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Dutch Fisher Children. 
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HOLLAND 73 



AND 



THE HOLLANDERS 



BY 

DAVID S. MELDRUM 

AUTHOR OF **THE STORY OF MARGREDEL 



With Numerous Illustrations 



NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1898 



38879 



Copyright, 1898, 
By Dodd, Mead and Company. 



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John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A. 



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MANY FRIENDS IN HOLLAND 



Table of Contents 

Page 

Impressions of Holland of To-day ...... i 

How Holland is Governed ..,,,... 148 

The Fight with the Waters , . » » , . . . 196 

How Holland is Educated 244 4 

'S Hertogenbosch and the Southern Provinces . 265 

Utrecht, and the East 287 

Groningen and the North 314 

Amsterdam and the Holland Provinces . . . . 350 

Middelburg and the Islands of Zeeland . . . . 392 



Illustrations 



^y Page 

Dutch Fisher Children Frontispiece 

Amsterdam 3 

Leidschendam 7 

A North-Holland Canal 13 

A ZuiDER Zee Type 16 

The Vital Strength of North-Holland , . 21 

North Sea Fisher Folk « . 25 

The Hayloft . 31 

A Mill in North Brabant . 41 

The Sheep Shed 45 

A Zeeland Girl 48 

A Farm on the Sand 4 51 

A Fisher-Child of Scheveningen 56 

The Last Load 61 

Zuidlaren, in Drente 65 

A Dutch Interior 69 

A Woman of Dutch Flanders 72 

The Heeren Gracht, Amsterdam ^-^ 

An Amsterdam Apple Woman Z^ 

Homewards 87 

On a Lonely Farm 91 

The Canal Horse 94 

A Marken Boy 99 

The Farm Labourer 105 

Church-goers in North Brabant iii 

The Village 117 

A Man of Long Views 127 

A Peasant Boy „ 133 

Hay-making 139 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

In an Eastern Province 143 

Dogs in Cart 147 

The Stadhuis at The Hague 153 

The Burgomaster of Marken t6o 

A Gossip 173 

A Peep in the Hague 177 

The Maurits huis, in the Binnenhof, The Hague i8r 

The Meeting-place of the Chambers, in the Binnenhof, The 

Hague 185 

Portrait of H. M. Queen Wilhelmina, in Frisian Costume . 192 

The Palace in the Noordeinde 195 

The Little Mill 197 

On the North Sea . . 203 

Fresh Fish 207 

The Bridge in the Meadow 213 

The Storm • • • 219 

The Mill 225 

North Sea Fishermen 231 

— In the Docks, Amsterdam 234 

The Ditch 240 

Map of Holland ' . 241 

Cow-girl 247 

Holiday Weather 253^ 

Soldier 256 

The Farm 259 

Ploughing . 267 

In Maastricht 273 

The Church of Breda 280 

Home-coming Sheep 289 

In the Wood 297 

A Town Canal 304 

The Dog in the Cart 310 

-4-- Washing Day 318 

A Kermis Fantasy 324 

Tramps 331 

-^Rye-bread 341 

\y' Skating 343 

The Milch-cow 347 

Street Vendor . " 352 

An Amsterdam Type 355 



ILLUSTRATIONS xiii 

Page 

'-jAn Amsterdam Type 359 

The West Tower 363 

A Rotterdam Type 367 

Marken Father and Son 371 

The Maassluis 375 

RijswijK 3S2, 

The Harbour 387 

The Cathedral of Dort 390 

A Lady of Tholen 394 

Woman of the Isle of Walcheren 396 

Going to Market in Walcheren 398 

Brabant Costume 400 

Dutch Costume 402 



Holland and the Hollanders 



^ 



IMPRESSIONS OF HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 



WHETHER he lands at Flushing or at The Hook, 
or crosses the frontier at Emmerich or Venlo 
or Roosendaal, the holiday-maker almost always turns 
his steps at once into the well-beaten tracks between 
the Zuider Zee and the Schelde. He is led, thus, to 
most that seems characteristic of Holland : the Zuider 
Zee itself, with its fleets of fishing-boats, its islands 
and sand-banks, the '' dead cities " on its shores, — 
Enkhuizen, Medemblik, Hoorn, Stavoren ; — Zaandam, 
of the windmills ; Amsterdam, with her narrow streets 
and busy quays, her pictures, her leaven of modern 
ideas working in stiff traditions, fighting, in defiance 
of exclusion from the sea, to maintain her commercial 
prestige against the upstart Rotterdam ; Delft, where 
the StadJwiiders sleep encircled by countless canals; 
the archipelago of Zeeland, insularly conservative : a 
land of windmill and canal, of deep green fields, often 
treeless, of dikes and inland seas and lakes, of curi- 
ously costumed fisher- and country-folk. Such, not 

I 



2 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

unnaturally, is the tourist's picture of Holland, for it is 
the true picture of the Holland of his route. 

Yet he may easily miss the real significance of all 
that he sees. He may find himself upon a great Dutch 
dike with green fields lying round cosy farm towns far 
beneath him on the one hand, and on the other, a few 
feet only below where he stands, the waters of the 
North Sea lapping the granite dike-face ; yet he may 
not realise that four provinces are, like the fields and 
the farms, endangered by the ocean. As he drives 
across the flat lands of the polders from Alkmaar to 
Purmerend, or sails down the North Sea Canal through 
the Y-polders, little more than an inkling of all that 
that reclamation entailed may come to him. He may 
traverse North-Holland and Friesland, and cross the 
Biesbosch, without a guess at tragedies comparable 
only with those of the Khodinsky Plain and the seis- 
mic wave in Japan, — of scores of villages swallowed 
up in a day, and the continent on which they stood 
become a sea. Or, if he goes between Amsterdam and 
Leiden, to see the Haarlemmer Meer which was drained 
so recently as 1848 at a cost of seven hundred thou- 
sand pounds, it is certain that, with all the knowledge of 
these and other figures he can boast, he may not be 
persuaded that the accident was possible which is de- 
scribed thus in the official report of the undertaking : 

" A curious phenomenon occurred in connection with the 
outer dike of the canal on the east side of the lake, where it 
crossed an area o.f floating soil which bordered wide ponds 
near the village of Aalsmeer. An area of many acres, de- 




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4 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

tached by the canal from the old works of defence against the 
lake, found itself one fine day driven by the tempest from 
the bank of the canal to the other side of the pond. The 
proprietor implored the aid of the Commission. His land 
had floated to the opposite shore, widely separated from his 
other fields, and resting on water that was not his own. By 
the continued effort of the proprietor and of the Commission, 
these fugitive fields were towed back to the borders of the 
canal and pinned in place by piles and poles which pre- 
vented them from undertaking another voyage." 

Holland of the tourist is like these acres, liable to float 
away were she not pinned in her place in Europe by 
piles and poles; but these are hidden underground, 
and so her danger is not obvious. It is no wonder if 
the traveller misses the true significance of what he 
looks upon, — the all-importance of half an inch of 
water. 

We must turn to the map (which ought always to 
be open at hand when we read of Holland) if we too 
are not to miss its significance. In the first place, this 
'' tourist area " is the lowest-lying portion of the 
country. All who have travelled on Dutch waterways 
must have noticed on their course black or blue boards, 
evidently for water measurements, with white indicating 
lines, and the letters A. P. *' A. P.," which stands for 
" Amsterdamsche Peil," was the symbol for the average 
flood-level of the Y at Amsterdam. That was in the 
days before the Y was drained and made a canal, and 
when It was an Inland lake stretching to Halfweg on 
the south and almost to Beverwijk on the west; and 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 5 

its ordinary flood level then is still used as the zero 
point in all water measurements in Holland. Now if, 
starting at Den Helder in the north of North-Holland, 
we draw a line to inclose Friesland and the north of 
Groningen, and following the eastern shores of the 
Zuider Zee to about Naarden, from there south to Gor- 
kum, where the Waal and the Maas meet, and then in 
a southwesterly direction to take in the islands of Zee- 
land, the line so drawn, with the coast-line on the North 
Sea, defines the tourist area at its most extended reach. 
Saving the fringe of dunes on the sea, — the great 
natural dikes behind which the Netherlands were born, 
— all this area is at or below A. P. Whereas, with the 
exception of a fringe of Friesland (which can scarce 
be said to be in the tourist route) and of Overysel, on 
the east shores of the Zuider Zee, all the remainder of 
Holland is above A. P. ; and some parts of it, as in the 
south of Limburg and the centre of the Veluwe, are 
very considerably above it. 

With the map still before us, let us consider the 
geographical history of this portion of Holland which 
it is convenient to name the " tourist area." It is the 
delta of great rivers that burst their mountain barriers, 
and bit by bit deposited in the inland sea within the 
dunes a new country, — a quaking morass, but tree- 
grown, and a footing for man where once the waters 
lay. The rivers had conquered for a time. A belt of 
low fen half lay, half floated, beyond the diluvium. 
But the tide turned. Listead of a peninsula thrown 
boldly out into the ocean, now we find a broken coast, 



6 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

compressed by the ocean which grips the rivers at 
the throat. From the Eems to the Schelde, the sea 
is blatant of its triumphs. For long it had menaced 
the low fen at the Eems mouth, and in 1277 it swal- 
lowed up twenty thousand acres, with thirty-three vil- 
lages upon them. Thus the Dollard was formed. In 
the same way and about the same time the Lauwers 
Zee (the Groningen Diep) came into existence, and 
Dokkum found itself a sea-town. On the map of Hol- 
land of the twelfth century, Texel and Vlieland and the 
crescent of islands to the Baltic were joined with 
the mainland. The Ysel issued on the sea through 
the narrow channel between Texel and Den Helder, 
and the Vlie through another on the north of the 
present Vlieland. In the heart of the Northern Prov- 
inces lay the Lake of Flevo. By the great flood , of 
All Saints' Day, 11 70, the lowlands by these rivers 
began to fall away. In the succeeding two centuries, 
nearly a million acres had been engulphed, and by the 
beginning of the fifteenth, there was left the Zuider Zee 
of to-day, with only the islands of diluvium appearing 
upon it. Come down the coast of North-Holland, 
where the natural dunes seem to bar the sea's encroach- 
ments. Here is Schoorl, where the English landed in 
1799. Those of them who were killed were buried 
within the dunes. In 1864, their bones were found 
on the seaward side. At Katwijk, where the decrepit 
Rhine is lifted into the ocean, the House of the Britons 
commanded the old mouth. It emerged from the 
dunes in 1520, and in 1694, when they were last seen, 



8 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

the foundations were sixteen hundred paces out to sea. 
Katwijk and Egmond and Scheveningen have con- 
stantly to be removed inland. In 1570 half of the vil- 
lage of Scheveningen disappeared ; and the present 
church, now looking over the sea, was built in place 
of one two miles nearer the shore hi the centre of the 
village of that time. To this day, the High Street, the 
old dike, of Rotterdam preserves the green fields to 
Delft as by a miracle. Where now a string of fishing- 
boats can hardly issue to the sea at Brielle upon the 
Maas cabined and confined, William HI. sailed out in 
1 69 1 wdth a mighty fleet. The peat-beds on the coast 
of South-Holland are the remains of great forests that 
stood far inland from the sea. The Biesbosch was the 
centre of a low fen country, resting on North-Brabant, 
upon which lived a busy population : in November, 
142 I, the deluge came, twenty-five thousand acres fell 
in, and thirty-five villages disappeared from sight. 
There is scarce a foothold in the islands of Zeeland 
and South-Holland that has not been submerged within 
historic times. The all-conquering sea, taking the clay 
the rivers poured inter it, quickened it to richer prop- 
erties, and flung it back upon the islands and unpro- 
tected coasts and far up the river valleys. Thus 
Groningen and Friesland, and the West Friesland por- 
tion of North-Holland, tlie islands of South-Holland 
and of Zeeland, and Dutch Flanders across the Schelde, 
are all sea clay. 

The country, successfully assaulted by the ocean 
thus, was not without natural defence. All round it, 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 9 

from the mouth of the Zwin to Texcl and from Texel 
to Rottum, there was a wall of sandhills broken only 
where the rivers issued upon the sea. This stretch of 
wreathed and twisted and undulating sand, the crown 
of the sand dihu^um that slopes gently into the ocean 
to the outer fringes of the dangerous sandbanks that 
are the terror of mariners on the Netherlands coast, 
was the defence of Holland. It is her defence still. 
Where, as we have seen, it broke down, there were 
rivers issuing through it to the sea; and opposite these 
sea-gates, the rivers had cut channels in the sand- 
banks that helped to their own and the land's defeat. 
When sailing from Den Helder to Texel, or among the 
islands of Zeeland and South-Holland, you can see 
these channelled banks at low water like white sails on 
the western horizon, and if you were near them would 
find them bubbling with a life which the inrushing 
tide will speedily drown. But portions of the old dunes 
still protect the existing islands, and a range of them, 
practically unbroken, stretches from The Hook to Den 
Helder. The sea beats upon them ; it compresses 
them, it gnaws them, it drives them eastwards; but it 
has not broken through them ; and when it withdraws 
for a fresh attack, the wind, sweeping over the shore, 
lifts the sun-dried sand and carries it to them to renew 
their defence, and sprinkles it on the land within. 
Something will be said later about the appearance of 
this range of dunes against which the tides have been 
powerless, of their flora and fauna; what has to be 
noted here is that the country lying behind them is not 



10 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

clay, as It is where the sea has made its inroads, but is 
a stretch of low fen. 

From the dunes sometimes we come phimp upon 
this low land, but generally the descent is through 
sloping sandy fields. On these there is a rich growth 
of young wood that hides the view as we traverse 
them, but a steeple peeping up here and there tells of 
a village nestling on this inner slope of the dunes, and 
every now and then through a break in the under- 
growth we catch a glimpse of potato patches, and of 
the market-gardening, penuriously guarded, for which 
this tract is famous. And then at the lower edge of 
this sandy stretch, we cross the deep canals, lined with 
polled willows, that separate it from the low alluvial 
soil of Holland. From here to the eastern limits of 
what we have called the tourist area, the land lies at or 
below the A. P. water-level. For all the water upon it, 
there are no rivers ; rivers flow to the sea, but here 
there is no slope to the sea, unless it be the slope up- 
wards. For the land, in many places, is below the 
level of the ocean. So the river waters gathered, and 
lay stagnant. Mile after mile of low morass came into 
existence. But it was fen in greater or less solution. 
Where the sea-waters made these great excursions in 
the north and south of which we have spoken, it was 
the more soluble fen they washed out. So it was at 
the Dollard and the Zuider Zee. Sometimes, too, they 
overran the firmer tract, and scooping out the softer 
fen upon it left inland lakes, — deep, wide sheets of 
water that stormed and raged when the wind blew, till 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY II 

they burst their bounds and carried destruction to the 
country around. Such was the famous Haarlcmmer 
Meer, and such are some of the Friesland lakes. The 
land was woodless, so the inhabitants dredged the peat- 
beds for fuel, and in this way the waters gathered into 
inland lakes. The whole country was a series of sheets 
of water, separated by tracts of mud and bog which 
themselves were constantly being submerged. Grad- 
ually the water gained upon the land. Before 1 53 1, 
there were on the area of the Haarlemmer Meer four 
small lakes, with villa,fyes uoon their banks, the names 
of which we know. By the end of the century, one 
of the villages was gone; by the middle of the next 
there were no villages but only names to remember, 
and the four lakes had become one. During the 
Eighty Years' War, naval battles were fought upon 
this inland sea. In the beginning of the eighteenth 
century, it had gained until it covered forty-five thou- 
sand acres. On November 9, 1836, a hurricane from 
the west drove its waters to the gates of Amsterdam, 
submerging ten thousand acres. Six weeks later, by 
a hurricane from another direction, the country to 
Leiden was under water, and the lower part of the city 
inundated. What was happening on this great scale 
in North-Holland, w^as happening on a lesser all over 
this tourist area. From the western dunes to the 
eastern diluvium, Holland was one great swamp. 

To-day, although the surface of this area is changed, 
the natural conditions remain the same. The ocean 
still flings itself against the dunes, striving to burst its 



12 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

way in, or stealthily creeps up and down them, looking 
for an opening. It still is dispossessing the rivers, 
casting them back in confusion headlong upon the 
land. The country within the dunes has not changed 
its level. It still is at the mercy of the sea, should it 
pierce the dune-barriers ; it still is a reservoir for all 
the inland and rain waters. It wears a new, smiling 
face, but its constitution is the same as ever. In the 
old natural conditions, therefore, we find the expla- 
nation of the special and peculiar characteristics of 
the tourist area, — its dikes, its polders, its windmills ; 
and they are the measure of the patience and skill of 
Dutch engineering. Where the dunes are weak, they 
are artificially strengthened ; as can be seen on the 
shore of the Westland, the rich market-gardening 
tract south of the Hague, they are sometimes flanked 
by a dike. Where the dunes have been broken, dikes 
fill the gaps, — at Westkapelle, on the Island of Wal- 
cheren, and on the coast of North-Holland near Pet- 
ten. At Den Helder, the visitor can see the enormous 
chain that protects the neck of North-Holland ; and 
he can most easily compass the cities of the Zuider 
Zee by driving along the dikes that skirt its low-lying 
shores. Again, where the ocean has choked the 
rivers, new mouths have been made for them ; or 
else new waterways have been dug to the sea, and 
the dunes boldly cut to give them exit. The history 
of the Amsterdam and Rotterdam waterways is a 
story of marvellous enterprise. But the Dutch engi- 
neering works are for reclamation as well as for de- 




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14 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

fence. The sea is kept from further encroachments, 
and the rivers are confined at least within their winter 
beds ; and in addition both sea and rivers are being 
coriipelled to give up their eadier conquests. No 
sooner does the sea leave a sufficient deposit of clay 
on the outer side of the dike than it is impoldered, 
and in this way the coast of Holland is gaining more 
than the sea eats out of the dunes. The internal 
waters as well as the external are subdued. Thus the 
Haarlemmer Meer is a rich agricultural stretch. The 
old peat-dredged basins have been drained and com- 
pelled to yield luxurious crops. The lakes and rivers, 
if rivers some can be called, are diked and dammed, 
and by an elaborate system of draining, to be described 
later, whereby the windmills pump the waters of the 
polders from lower to higher reservoirs, to be carried 
ultimately to the main basins and to the sea, this 
swamp of Holland has become fertile meadow and 
garden and field. 

So fertile and smiling are the fields and meadows 
that, with the completest understanding of how they 
are what they are, we forget that what they have been 
they might be again were the vigilance of the polder 
government relaxed for a moment. The inhabitants 
themselves forget it apparently, living their busy lives 
without "disquieting fears. The traveller crossing the 
Wormer sees nothing to make him dream that in 
1825, through the bursting of a dike that may burst 
again, the whole polder w^as inundated, and most of 
its inhabitants drowned. The people trust the polder 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 15 

government, and we shall sec later that it is charged 
with the very fullest measure of power for carrying on 
a splendidly complete system of reclamation and de- 
fence. But it remains true that upon this old question 
of half an inch of water depends the safety of Holland 
to-day. What has been reclaimed must be kept. If 
the sea is to be held at bay, dunes must be guarded 
and dikes repaired; the mills must swing their arms if 
the polders are to be drained ; the levels of a thousand 
canals must be regulated to an inch if the lowlands 
are not to fall back into a swamp again. That is the 
real significance of the characteristics of Holland that 
strike the eye of the traveller to-day. 



II 



The soil of the Dutch lowlands, then, is of two kinds 
chiefly. Thei^ is the fertile sea-clay which we find 
in all Zeeland, in parts of North-Holland and South- 
Holland, and on the north coasts of Friesland and 
Groningen ; and there is the marshy fen land of North- 
and South-Holland and the southwest of Friesland. 
By this distinction of soils we are guided to a distinc- 
tion in agriculture. Broadly speaking, there is cattle- 
rearing where there is low fen. On it, tillage is 
impracticable, and wood does not grow. Instead, there 
are the juicy green flat meadows, with their black and 
white cattle, and the intersecting canals down which 
the milk-maids come sailing with their milking-pails 



i6 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

in the late afternoon. There, too, are the great hay 
crop, and the butter and cheese industry that fills the 
markets of Alkmaar, Hoorn, Sneek, and Harlingen. 
From Rotterdam to Den Helder and from Stavoren to 




A ZuiDER Zee Type. 



Leeuwarden, by rail, everywhere save in the newer 
polders, you look out upon these monotonous meadows 
stretching away on either side. The Dutchman will 
not admit their sadness unless it be under the depress- 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 17 

incf mists of winter, when the cattle are indoors and 
the polders lie silent. Bright sun, blue sky, green 
meadows, thriving cattle: these are not sad, he says. 
It is your Scots hills that are sad. The brightness 
is not. to be denied ; and yet it is true that upon many 
spectators the reduplication of these horizontal lines 
has a saddening and a depressing effect. No one 
travelling from Alkmaar to Den Helder in the sum- 
mer evening could help being affected with a most 
poignant melancholy by these meadow lands stretch- 
ing away into the gloaming. And, indeed, it is diffi- 
cult for a stranger to live a week in the low countries 
without suffering from a depression of spirit. 

The best picture of the farmer of these meadows, as 
of every Dutch type, has been draw^n by " Hildebrand." 
Behind this pseudonym is the venerable personality 
of Dr. Nicolaas Beets, a minister of the Church, a 
professor at Utrecht University, and a poet, who now 
lives in retirement in the enjoyment of an almost 
European celebrity derived from a prose work of 
a singularly national quality. The " Camera Obscura " 
ranges v/idely over the field of Dutch life and 
character. It is recognised as a work of pure style ; 
though colloquial, it is always distinguished. True, 
it sets no model for the younger Dutch writers whose 
steps have gone far — very far — along decadent paths. 
The " Camera Obscura" is not decadent. It is, indeed, 
m.ost human and wholesome, with a method as legiti- 
mate as its observation is keen and wide. In conse- 
quence, the book has been absorbed by the nation, 

2 



1 8 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

and the young Dutchman, though he may profess 
admiration for the Nieitwe Gidsy knows the " Camera," 
His father read it; he himself quotes it, unconsciously. 
The following description from it of the North-Hol- 
land Boer, therefore, is something characteristically 
Dutch ; and I have the farther excuse for quoting 
it that English is almost the only European lan- 
guage into which the *' Camera " has not been wholly 
translated. 



The North Holland Boer. 

It is Alkmaar, on a Friday forenoon in the cheese- 
season. All the villages — seventy or eighty of them 
— round the capital of North Holland are here. 
Beemster, Purmer, and Schermer polders have emptied 
themselves into the neat little town. All the streets 
that lead to a gate, and even more so the so-called 
'' Dijk" (a large square in the centre of the town), are 
filled with their carts, green and yellow and gay with 
flower-pots, flourishing letters, and lines of poetry 
painted on the tailboards. Every stable reeks with 
the steam of their horses, every inn and tavern with 
the fumes of their pipes; and there is not a barber's 
chair that does not beam with their lathered faces. Go 
wheresoever you like — to the tobacconist, to the gro- 
cer, to the china merchant, to the shoemaker whose 
window displays twice the usual stock, to the notary, 
to the advocate, to the doctor, to the thousand and 
one dijk graven (superintendents) and tre^^surers of 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY . 19 

polders: everywhere you meet a boer. One is search- 
ing for the burgomaster of his own village, who, it 
seems, can best look after the interests of his children 
when he is in Alkmaar; another applies to the black- 
smith for medicine for a sick horse, though it is certain 
the smith never has seen the horse except in good 
condition. 

Alkmaar, which on other days of the week is so 
still and dull that it seems fit for funerals only (and, 
indeed, there is a beautiful burial ground), is now 
as busy as a beehive. And truly it is a hive, where 
are gathered the bees that sucked the honey out of 
the Kenmer and West Friesland buttercups. The 
" Langstraat," ■ — so called, it seems, from the family 
" De Lange," whose name, qualified by all the letters 
of the alphabet, shines on three door-posts out of four 
— is filled with peasants, the women in long rows 
loitering on the pavements in front of the goldsmith's, 
or walking in and out of the various cake-shops, talk- 
ing loudly, laughing with big mouths, and slapping 
their knees at each fresh outbreak of peasant-woman's 
wit. 

The busiest part of the town is the Waagplcin 
(weighing square). Thousands of pounds' weight of 
little yellow cheeses are spread on large waxcloths, 
marked with the initials of their owners ; and the whole 
must be sold before two o'clock. After that hour 
no bargaining takes place; and no peasant can, or 
likes to, take his cheese home again. He has to sell 
them even as the wholesale merchants have to buy 



20 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

them. To make most of his cheese is an art, under- 
standed of many a blate-looking peasant, stupid enough 
in all things else. It is amusing to watch the assumed 
heat wherewith they chaffer, and close a bargain, as if 
they would assure one another by grumpy faces that 
they '11 beat their hands to blood. And now come 
the cheese-porters, in white clothes, and yellow, green, 
or red hats, jog-trotting as usual, to carry the bought 
quantity on their litters and barrows to the ships, or 
to the warehouses, or to whithersoever it has to go. 

Now, you have seen the vital strength of North- 
Holland. Nothing save this cheese defends it against 
the sea, makes and preserves it a green country, and 
keeps all North-Holland chimneys smoking. Would 
you know whether the boer is doing well? Ask the 
price of cheese. You imagine, perhaps, that it is the 
church-collectors on Sunday who notice that Friday 
has been a good day; that the lord of the manor is 
the best judge of whether the cheese has been praizig 
(high priced) during the year. On the contrary, the 
goldsmiths and the cake-bakers can tell best of all; 
and the Alkmaar kermis (fair) flourishes accordingly. 
Then, the women have a sweet tooth, and an eye for 
finery, and the men-folk know how to spend money 
when they are out for a holiday. In 1841, the wet 
year, when the hay-crop was a failure, the kermis bells 
swung above as many chaises and carts entering the 
towngates as ever. The boeren and boerinnen drank 
the white wine, and sipped the red gin and sugar, and 
ate the ponte koek with no less noisy signs of admira- 




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22 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

tion than last year for the noble art of neck-breaking 
and the unsurpassable jokes of the clown, who flopped 
like a stick. Complaints are kept for Christmas, when 
the lord of the manor makes up his book. 

The genuine, old North-Holland boer is disap- 
pearing and altering as all types alter. On this Alk- 
maar cheese-market, you find him in all his variety. 
This old fellow with smiling lips, and bright, laughing 
eyes that look from under the broad-brimmed, round- 
crowned hat, which he keeps on his head with a 
tobacco-pipe-shank, is the oldest type. A narrow, 
red cotton scarf is folded about his neck by tiny gold 
buttons. A long brown waistcoat, with a row of big 
buttons that are not in active service — hooks-and- 
eyes do the work — reaches over his hips. His short 
trousT-.s look upon the region of shins and calves 
as far beneath them, and leave it to the gray stock- 
ings that end in thick shoes with golden buckles. 
There are a few only of these old fellows left; you 
can see them walking across the market with long, 
peeled sticks reaching to their chins. 

I have not room for all the other types ! Do you 
wish to see the youngest? Here it is. A short, blue, 
close jacket, with velvet collar, reaches a little below 
the shoulder blades; all else is trousers — trousers 
made of velveteen, — save a woollen necktie, mottled 
red, green, and yellow, and on his head, now a big, 
broad, extensive tall hat, or again a hairy fur cap, with 
the flap down over his eyes or in his neck, according 
to sunshine or rain. Ten to one, the old fellow is 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 23 

gay and chatty, and the young dour and stiff, sus- 
picious and a stick. 

The chief end of the North-Holland boer is to go 
to market. He is the salesman and administrator of 
his gear; that's all. His qualities are more negative 
than positive. Do you ask if he is zealous? I answer: 
" He looks well after his spiil (farm and everything)." 
Does he live a regular life? "He drinks on market 
days and fairs only." Is he honest? " He never 
milks his neighbour's cows." Is he kind-hearted ? 
** He is good to his cattle." Does he love his wife? 
^* There is no better kcezcr (maker of cheese)." Is he 
a fighter and a rowdy? "Not if he is sober." Is he 
fond of his children? " They get plenty of bread and 
butter, and the schoolmaster at any rate may net give 
them a thrashing! " Is he religious? " He gocb regu- 
larly to church ! " 

To live in a farm of his own somewhere in the 
polders, surrounded by a flat country, with nothing 
to break his horizon and no servants save his own 
children: that is his ideal. His idols, a fine black and 
white cow, with full udders, and a young horse yoked 
in the bright shining peasant chaise with gilt wheels. 
Seated in this, the lightest and most elegant of 
vehicles old-fashioned or new, going to the fair with 
his busket wife beside him, and passing his fellows 
on the way by dint of much pulling at the reins (he 
never uses a whip): — then he enjoys himself in a 
manner unknown to the "Abtswouder boer" (of the 
poem) when he got excited over '* eating apples, 



24 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

plucking pears, mowing, haying; filling barn and rick 
with fruits and greens; shearing sheep and pressing 
udders." 

It may seem strange to seek for the likeness of the 
Dutch lowland dairy farmer in a portrait drawn sixty 
years ago ; but in sixty years he has altered little. 
The changes and modifications in the type evident to 
the keen eye of " Hildebrand " are hidden from the 
foreigner. In politics and in matters connected with 
the Church he is Progressive, as we should call it. I 
believe that of the four members of the Second Cham- 
ber elected North of the Y, one is a Liberal, two are 
advanced Liberals, and the fourth is a Radical Calvin- 
ist, — a type not unfamiliar at home. But in all else 
the Dutch boer is conservative. He cuts his corn and 
mows his hay and makes his butter and cheese in the 
manner in which his grandfather did these things, and 
for that very reason; or if he is advancing, it is unwill- 
ingly only, and of recent years, prodded by the com- 
petition of other countries to which his conservative 
and unenterprising and even lazy methods have given 
an opening. 

The Dutch dairy-farmer is advancing under that 
pressure, as we shall see later when we visit his land. 
Perhaps it ought to be said rather that he is being ad- 
vanced. A conservative, rooted adherence to the ways 
of his fathers is still the keynote of his character. 
Therein he differs little from the farmer on the clay: 
dwellers on the clay are always tenacious. No coun- 




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26 HOLLANp AND THE HOLLANDERS 

try in the world is more gracious to the husbandman 
than the sea-polders of Zeeland and the new polders 
on the fen, and there, possibly, the land is as well 
farmed as lan^ can be. Enterprise has not been want- 
ing, and enterprise has not always been profitable. 
There were model-farms on these polders that it used 
to be tlie fashion for travellers from all countries to 
visit. Their farmers were wealthy and enthusiastic, and 
hospitably entertained the delighted stranger. If you 
ask about these farms now, you will be told that they 
served as models how the polders ought not to be 
farmed. It is of no use to put a steam plough into 
land which a steam plough tears the heart out of. But 
there are less heroic and wiser enterprises possible for 
the average farmer on the rich grain lands, which he has 
carefully fought shy of, and as a consequence his con- 
dition is not flourishing. All over Holland, indeed, 
agriculture is at a pass. There are many in the 
country who declare that the laziness of the boers is 
the root of the evil. The boers are not so much lazy 
as wanting in push, and already, now that the pressure 
of bad times has roused them, their condition is im- 
proving. So much one is assured. There seem, how- 
ever, other causes for the depression. Rents have risen 
high, and with them the price of land. From 1850 
to about 1880, when this upward movement was con- 
tinued, the farmers were making money from high 
prices in grain, and a heavy export of cattle. Men 
sunk their capital in the soil. When an owner died, it 
frequently happened that one of the children who 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 27 

determined to hold the place bought out his brothers 
and sisters at a fancy price raised much above the real 
value by the sentiment of attachment to the old home. 
A fall in prices came, and of course it bore hardest on 
those who had purchased their lands at the high price. 
Farms have become mortgaged. Capitalists who 
bought in the fat years have been bitten. I know of 
fine land in the Betuwe which was bought in 1879 
while yielding four-and-a-half per cent and now yields 
little more than two. In the new polders, especially, 
land has been bought and held too dearly. It is 
true that within comparatively recent years some 
farmers paying high rents in these have done well. A 
Dutch gentleman assured me that he never had a more 
profitable transaction than ten years' farming of some 
land in the Haarlemmer Meer at a rent o^ £'j lOs. per 
acre. But he grew wheat and potatoes alternately, — 
his landlord not interfering, — ploughed every year 
deeper, and during the ten years did no manuring. 
Of course he exhausted the land. The polders will 
stand much. It is believed that the new lands at pres- 
ent being reclaimed at the Dollard will grow crops tor 
fifty years without an ounce of compost, so fertile are 
they. There are, however, limits to the fertility even 
of Dutch polders. These acres in the Haarlemmer 
Meer that were let at £'/ los. are now let at less than 
the half, and the farmer who leases them probably has 
some difificulty in making ends meet on a farm where 
his predecessor made money. The shutting up of the 
English and other ports for fat cattle (on the plea, not 



28 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

believed for a moment by the Dutchman, of protec- 
tion against disease) was the heaviest blow to the 
peasants, and many of them were ruined. In Fries- 
land, where the rise in prices had been highest, the 
fall of course was deepest. From want of money, 
the farmers have let the land deteriorate, the labourers 
find it difficult to get work, and the poor-rates have 
increased so enormously that many of the well-to-do 
inhabitants have left the province to escape the heavy 
burden. Of recent years a great deal of arable land 
has been laid down in grass, which means years of out- 
lay and little production. In such cases, generally, it 
is true, the landlord is giving compensation, but in 
Holland a claim for compensation does not lie. Even 
from the Betuv/e come complaints : competition is 
killing the profits of fruit-growing, and prices are .fall- 
ing in the horse-fairs at Tiel, 

A full half, probably, of the land in Holland is 
farmed by the proprietor, but he is a peasant proprie- 
tor. You look in vain for the larcre landowners of 
England or of Germany who live not only upon their 
rents, but on the sales from their own cultivation also. 
You look almost in vain, indeed, for any large land- 
owners ; for under the Dutch law whereby all the chil- 
dren share their father's possessions, wide acres are 
narrowed and the fields belonging to the mansion 
house lie in a close circle round the elms and hazels of 
the demesne. The Dutch country gentleman indulges 
a taste for. gardening, makes a profit out of growing 
the low hazel that one sees being borne down the 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 29 

canals everywhere for a great variety of purposes, and 
shoots his partridges and hares and mallards. He does 
not keep a model home-farm and breed fine stock. 
In Holland the men who breed stock are called boers. 
Whether they own their hundred acres or rent them, 
though their bank accounts are fatter than their beeves, 
the boers are peasants ; a class by themselves, between 
whom and the professional middle class there is appar- 
ently no stepping-stone. In a market town in England, 
you will find together, bargaining, discussing, advising, 
gossiping, a man who beds his own beasts and follows 
his Qwn plough, while his son perhaps has a charge of 
the cattle and sheep on his out-ficlds ; and a man with 
a son at Cambridge, who himself rides to hounds ; and 
a score of others of different social grades between. 
It would be in error to say that in Holland that is an 
impossible sight. The temptation in writing about a 
strange country, seen superficially only, as a foreign 
country must necessarily be seen, is to generalise, to 
strain facts to suit classifications ; and probably writers 
on Holland have yielded more easily than usual to that 
temptation and to the exaggeration of small details. 
I do not forget the gentlemen-farmers of the Betuwe, 
or the farm-houses, like mansions, in Groningen. Not 
that the spaciousness of the dwelling or any such evi- 
dence of the eyes counts for much. There is — or 
at any rate there was not long ago — in one of the 
islands of Zeeland a farm-town bearing over the gate- 
way a motto in Latin, the meaning of which I believe 
the farmer knew very well. In his sitting-room there 



30 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

was a piano, from which all the musical mechanism 
had been removed, so that the case might be used as 
a cupboard. That is not an isolated instance. I could 
take you to a boerderij in a lowland province, where a 
boer lives with his wife and several children in a hand- 
some house, and has a capital account of some thou- 
sands of guilders. The family use one sitting-room only 
— the kitchen, — and they all sleep together in one 
bed-room. Make the thousands of guilders hundreds, 
and that boerderij becomes typicaL Behind the walls 
of some at least of these elegant Groningen mansions, 
I can say, there exists no equivalent elegance of man- 
ners. Certainly there are many exceptions. From a 
boer home a man can, and does, rise to high positions 
in his country; men rise to such from the small shop- 
keeper class, and after that anything seems possible. 
There are many farmer households with sons at the 
University, and daughters who cultivate an elegant 
taste after the butter-making of the morning. But 
they are exceptions in their own class, if indeed they 
can be said to belong to the boer class at all. For, 
rich or poor, almost invariably the farmer is a peasant. 
Rich or poor, he dresses as a boer; in the highlands, 
indeed, less uniformly, but in the lowlands in thick 
black cloth, peaked cap, light coloured stockings, 
probably in velvet slippers in place of the discarded 
sabots, as may be seen any market day. The Dutch 
boer remains the Dutch boer, self-reliant, rooted to the 
soil, often keenly intelligent, rather lazy often, the 
ba^ckbone, the " vital strength," of his country. Yet, 




The Hayloft. 
From a painting by J. J. van de Sande Bakluiyzen. 



32 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

especially now that it is in a depressed condition, 
agriculture in Holland may feel the lack of a nobler 
infusion. 

Besides dairy-farming and the growing of grain and 
green crops, there are on the soil of the lowlands 
other industries characteristically Dutch or engaged in 
by the Dutch in a characteristic manner. Upon the 
hyacinth and tulip fields of Haarlem is focussed the 
Hollander's love and scientific appreciation of flowers, 
ministered to by the navigators and travellers of the 
adventurous days, and witnessed to still by the flower- 
box on the peat boat no less than by the Botanic Gar- 
dens of Amsterdam and Leiden. In the Westland, 
between The Hague and The Hook, is to be seen in 
perfection market-gardening upon a soil magnificently 
prepared for that end by ingenious labour. The po- 
tato patches in the hollows of the inner dunes testify 
to the frugal industry that finds a living also in every 
reed and willow- sapling, — the patient and penurious 
reverse of the character of a people who assault 
the ocean daily, and flaunt the richest colonies in the 
world in the eyes of their ambitious neighbours. The 
dunes themselves are planted, and thus from the pro- 
tection of their defences the Dutch snatch a double 
profit. Round the coasts, again, are the homes of 
fishermen who ply an industry more romantic and 
even more ancient than agriculture. Many who visit 
Holland carry away the impression that they have 
seen the pride of the Dutch fisheries in the islands of 
Zeeland and the Zuider Zee to which they were at- 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 33 

tracted by the quaint and variegated dress of the 
fisher-folk. That is not so. Costume, there, is the 
beautiful accretion of decay. A cloud rests over 
these inland fisheries, brightened only by a chance 
happy speculation in anchovies. The stir and bar- 
gaining of the picturesque crowds in the fish-markets 
of Den Helder and Amsterdam too frequently are a 
grim fight with want. The beautiful interiors of the 
Volendammers — that stalwart race — are often visited 
with poverty. I read that the men of Urk are leaving 
their boats to " take on " in the ocean-going steamers; 
and so it is, no doubt, in the other islands. The great 
North Sea fishing fleet does not sail from there, but 
from the Maas towns and from the coast villages of 
Scheveningen, Noordwijk, and Katwijk; and we shall 
find, when we visit Vlaardingen, the head place of the 
fisheries still, that in them, also, a gradual transmuta- 
tion is going on. The Scheveningen boms, made so 
familiar to us by the pictures of Mr. Mesdag, must go 
the way of the older busses. Sailing boats will disap- 
pear before steamers, as the local butter-markets will 
disappear before the factories. The decay of the 
picturesque may be deplored, but at any rate the spirit 
of the Dutchman is asserting itself in the fabric he is 
rearing in its place. Thickly studded, too, over the 
lowlands are a thousand busy hives, — hamlets that 
wear the air of villages, villages with the stir of towns, 
towns with all the paraphernalia of small cities, and 
small cities that hold up their heads with the pride of 
equality beside Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Nowhere 

3 



34 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

in the world, probably, are the realities of life — love, 
marriage, work, rivalry, death, the niggardliness and 
bountifulness of Nature, and the art, affection, and 
neighbourliness of man — brought home to one more 
vividly than in this little reclaimed delta on the North 
Sea. 



Ill 

From the " tourist area," as I have called it, we 
pass to the higher grounds in the east by an easy 
transition in the province of Utrecht. The city of 
Utrecht (as a glance at the map will discover) lies 
at the junction of the two. The low meadows flow 
over the western borders of the province from North- 
and South-Pf oUand ; but they stop at the city walls. 
" Have we reached the Continent at last? " Louis 
Napoleon cried, or so the story runs, when he came 
to Utrecht in his eastward progression. The ancient 
city is a gate, as it were, to the higher grounds,^ 
that hilly country of which the Dutch are so jealous 
when Holland is described as a land of ditch and tree- 
less field by those who have not pushed beyond these. 
Probably many are preserved from the error of speak- 
ing of a treeless Holland only by the recollection of 
't Haagsche Bosch, through which they passed in their 
drives out from The Hague, or of the Middagter Allee 
near Arnhem. But from Arnhem to Utrecht there 
stretches still a grand belt of wood that almost keeps 
true the old saying that a squirrel can go between 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 35 

them without touching ground. This line — by Zcist, 
Doom, Amcrongen, Reenen, VVageningen, the south- 
ern borders of the Veluwe, ranged far above the 
Rhine and the Betuwe beyond — is studded with the 
summer houses of the city merchants, all with their 
cosy verandahs, and most of them surrounded by the 
formal arrangement of lake and flower-plot, so dear 
to the Dutchman, so petty and ugly in English eyes. 
Round the country seats of the old families on the 
same line one finds splendid wood, avenues of beech 
and fir and lime which it would be difficult to Uiatch 
anywhere. And when we push farther into the 
Veluwe, we come to woods more extensive still. In 
Utrecht province, within sight of the Dom, to go no 
farther afield, you can walk for miles along ant-run 
sandy tracks between fragrant pines, or through close- 
set young firs, glimmering grey, veiling as with 
smoke the green beyond ; or lie knee-deep in the 
heather in a great wide waste with no living thing near 
save the lici-tuters screaming against the turquoise 
sky. And yet if you had held to the right hand in- 
stead of to the left at starting, you would have been 
led through flat deep-green meadows, where black 
cattle browse and blue-bloused boers make the hay, 
or would have skirted cherry-orchards, or again the 
tall bean-sticks; but always you would have struck 
canals that reflect swinging sails and are spanned by 
innumerable bridges. And here, too, are to be found 
some of the quaintest of the old towns of Holland : 
Wijk-bij-Duurstede, with its castle dating from the 



36 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

days of Charlemagne, and Yselstein, — close, narrow- 
streeted, the flat, grey house-fronts fenced with shady 
lindens, cut to allow the light to reach the windows, 
crusted with age, the iron-work ornaments of the six- 
teenth century, say, seeming modern beside the gen- 
eral ancientness. One thing the Utrecht province 
does not have — the sea. And thus, perhaps, in it 
we miss the greatest charm of all : the approach 
across the deep green lands to the western dunes, 
with their delicate green helm, the plodding through 
these scooped sandhills, and the coming out upon 
the dazzling white sands, shell-strewed, along which 
the coast shimmers in the heat haze, with the villages 
floating in it like a mirage, or is blotted out by the 
storm when the North Sea roars in the wind, or, again, 
is enveloped by the copper mist in which the sun 
stands like a boss of fire in a burnished shield. 

The higher lands in the east, like the lowlands of 
the west, have a great variety of scenery and interests, 
and exhibit in a scarcely less degree the triumph of 
the Dutch over nature. Soon after leaving Germany 
and shortly before it reaches Arnhem, the Rhine 
thrusts out westwards the most important of its many 
arms. Not far from Dordrecht, the arm so stretched, 
the Waal, joins hand with another river, the Maas, 
which In the south has been running a course more 
or less parallel with the Rhine. Between the two, 
and reaching a little beyond the Rhine in the north 
and overlapping the Maas in the south, and watered 
across by the friendly Waal, there is a tract of river- 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 37 

clay, the rich core of which is called the Bettiwe (good 
land), on account of its fertility, even as to the sandy 
region, farther north towards the Zuider Zee, is given 
the name of the Veluwe (barren land). On this pleas- 
ant country of the Betuwe we can set foot by crossing 
the Rhine from the province of Utrecht by the ferry- 
boat at VVijk-bij-Duurstede. For about a quarter of a 
mile a path, shaded by poplars and great willows, leads 
through fat fields with a gentle acclivity to what ap- 
pears a main road. Other paths run to brick and tile 
works, and to the jetties that dot the river-side as far 
as the eye can reach. There never was a more restful 
country-side, we say, nor one watered by a less turbu- 
lent river. Why should there be need of a dike here? 
For there is a dike : the broad grass-grown road along 
which we are now walking, considerably above the 
level of the belt of fields we have been admiring, and 
higher still above the cherry-orchards and farm-stead- 
ings on the inner side. Had our visit been paid seven 
months earlier, its use would have been more apparent. 
Seven months ago, this tract, some hundreds of yards 
broad, without the dike, the intcrivaardcn, was sub- 
merged. There was not a trace of all these pollards ; 
the great-boled willows looked like giants knee-deep 
in water. Had we been standing on the roadway then, 
and seen all this, and the river lapping the bank at 
our feet, where we can pick daisies now if we choose, 
and had turned next to view the orchards and stack- 
yards and cow-sheds within the dike, in the binncn- 
waardeii, we should have seen in a flash that the safety 



38 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

of a whole country-side depends upon this dike stand- 
ing firmly beneath us. 

But if in imagination we have pictured the danger, 
we walk along the dike this summer day with eyes ap- 
preciative of the safeguards. Every point in the land- 
scape wears a new significance. We understand now 
why it is that each building in the tnterwaarden has its 
ow^n superior level, its own little scheme of fortification ; 
why the farms and villages on the inner side nestle to 
the dike like chickens to the protecting wing. At 
present there is no danger ; the w^ater does not so 
much as lap the summer dikes that skirt it here and 
there. Even in winter, it does not always threaten the 
peace of the country people ; and every year it plays 
into their hands by giving them fresh powers to keep 
it in order. For when it covers the idterwaarden, the 
clay which in summer is carried to sea deposits itself 
on the fields, and silts up inlands, thereby strengthen- 
ing the dike, to which, indeed, in some places the 
water cannot reach now. At most, the river becomes 
sportive in little rivulets across the roadway, or causes 
a scare by burrowing beneath it and bubbling up on 
the other side. These are trivial outbreaks, compara- 
tively. It is ice, and not water, that the Betuwe has 
to fear. The river becomes frost-bound at its winter 
level. By-and-by the wind changes, going a point to 
the south : the ice melts, and melts first of all in the 
upper waters, and enormous blocks come sliding down, 
one over the other, lump upon lump, mounting to the 
dike. ''Uruiit! Urtmt! De Waaol die kruut f' is 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 30 

the country-side warning at such times, ** Come out! 
Come out! The Waal is drifting! " And all who can, 
do come out, night or day, to watch the weak or ex- 
posed spots. Their worldly possessions, if not their 
lives, depend on these withstanding the shock. 

We rest a few minutes at an iiitspanning near 
Maurik, eat rye bread and cheese, and drink a glass of 
milk, — a Dutch luncheon, — and over a cigar chat 
with the landlord and his wife about this enemy that 
disturbs their otherwise peaceful country. The old 
woman's mother (so we hear) used to tell of a terrible 
ijsgang (ice-drift) in "nine," that is in 1809. A few 
hundred yards from where we sit, the ice pierced the 
dike, and the water, rushing in, tumbled down build- 
ings as if they had been houses of cards, drowning 
some of the inmates, imprisoning others for a time in 
garrets, and leaving barren for years these cherry 
orchards from which reach us the sounds of the ** corn- 
crake " rattles wherewith the little boys of the Betuwe 
scare the sparrows from the red fruit. That was a bad 
ijsgang ; but nothing to another that almost happened 
six years ago, for the oldest inhabitant — we have met 
him at home — cannot remember so close a shave. 
The man and his wife chase each other in their con- 
versation with picturesque incidents of this disaster, 
still fresh in their memories ; and out of the cloud of 
broken English and colloquial Dutch, there rises be- 
fore our eyes the scene that night when the watchers, 
looking westwards, saw the lights of the ships on the 
river approach nearer and nearer until they stood up 



40 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

to the dike. Then suddenly they swung and went out. 
The waters had fallen as suddenly, and next morning 
found the vessels lying high and dry on the road with 
fields between them and the river now back almost to 
its normal level. This time, the dike was not broken. 

The Betuwe is a jewel well worth such strenuous 
guarding. Nature has favoured it, and the art of its 
inhabitants keeps it like a garden. It must be visited 
in spring, as indeed all the polder country ought to 
be ; then, through the flowery meadows and the 
orchards in blossom from 's Hertogenbosch to Kuilem- 
burg is surely one of the most beautiful railway jour- 
neys in the world. The rivers that water it are 
crowded with the traffic of middle Europe. The 
towns upon them — Tiel, Reenen, Kuilemburg, Bom- 
mel — are among the oldest and quaintest and most 
sweetly lying in the country. The roads are excellent 
for the '* bike " — for which, by the way, the populace 
in Holland have invented the expressive name of 
Fiets (Fr. Vite)\ and let not the bicyclist forget to 
take the route by the Linge, V Kleine Rivierke of the 
author Cremer. 

Beyond the Betuwe, to the northeast and east, lies 
the " Achterhoek " or back corner ot Gelderland,. the 
old countship of Zutphen; with hills and woods and 
moors and hundreds of little streams dotted with 
water-mills. To the south of the Betuwe, again, the 
land slopes constantly upwards until in the south of 
Limburg it reaches the highest point in the whole 
of Holland. The clay of the Maas joins the sand of 



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42 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

Brabant without any break of hills ; and in the sand 
itself there is no break, except the well-known desolate 
high fen, the Peel, that for centuries vied with the Maas 
as the natural frontier on the east. Beyond the Peel, 
still farther south, we leave the sand for the older 
formations of Limburg, where, in the neighbourhood 
of Kerkerade and Kloosterrade are the only coal 
mines in the country. The lower grounds in the 
north of North-Brabant, along the railway route from 
Flushing to Berlin, form an agricultural stretch where 
are grown rye, buckwheat, potatoes, and oats, the 
usual sand products. Round the towns are market 
gardens : the strawberries of Breda are famous. In 
the neighbourhood of Bergen-op-Zoom has sprung 
up a great beet-root industry. Along the valleys of 
the Maas tributaries, cattle-rearing is on the increase, 
and everywhere in the sand the cultivation of wood is 
a source of revenue. Higher up, nearer the Belgian 
frontiers, the shepherds herd their flocks, and the 
farmers send out their bees to suck the honey from 
the buckwheat and the heather blossoms. The Dutch 
call Limburg the garden of Holland, their admiration 
of its scenery no doubt being chiefly due to the con- 
trast it offers to that of the low lands. The soil is a 
rich, wheat-growing clay, cultivated to the field-edges, 
and supporting a numerous population that seems 
well-to-do ; the clay also supplies the potteries of 
Regout, one of the great industries of the manufactur- 
ing towns here, which are spoken of as an open sore 
in the social condition of Holland. Sandy soil and a 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 43 

Roman Catholic population, — these are the character- 
istics of the southern provinces. Here we are among 
the Flemings rather than among the Dutch. 

Now let us go back to Utrecht, and strike north- 
eastwards for the highlands of the north. Our way 
lies through 't Gooi and the Veluwe. Or, at any rate, 
we can go round by 't Gooi, — that odd little hilly 
corner of North-Holland that faces the Zuider Zee 
without any help from the dikes. The inhabitants of 
the neighbouring meadow lands, so an old wa'iter tells 
us, used to go to 't Gooi to see its beautiful variety of 
landscape. "In the valleys between the heather-clad 
hills are fertile fields, some sown, some mown, some 
covered with the white buckwheat blossoms like a sea 
of milk; from the highest hills, we see in one glance 
the Zuider Zee, the low Waterland, the blue Veluwe, 
moorland fields, meadows and woods," — so he de- 
scribes this beautiful, if not very fertile, corner in 
which the Amsterdammer often makes his home, as 
much from the desire to escape the rising taxes of the 
city as from a love for the beauties of the country. 

The blue Veluwe. The sandy Veluwe. Here we 
have the same variety of scenery as in 't Gooi; but 
there is more water, the hills are higher, and the woods 
are larger, — some of them, like the Beekbergsche and 
Soerensche Bosch, the largest in the country. A thin 
population lives on a poor agriculture and the cultiva- 
tion of w^ood, and where the mossy sheep-sheds shelter 
under the trees, we see those shepherds and those 
sheep to whom the genius of the painter Mauve was 



44 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

dedicated. Over the Ysel, we are in Overysel, and 
there most of the characteristic physical conditions of 
Holland meet. On the left beyond Meppel is the 
Land van Vollenhoven, where the cattle meadows roll 
away into Friesland. On the right is Twente, with 
many little rivers that rise in the hills in the east ; to 
all appearance another Achterhoek of Gelderland, 
only that here there are industries of which Gelderland 
knows nothing, and corn takes the place of rye and 
buckwheat. To the north are peat-lands that stretch 
away into desolate D rente. 

Drente is the province of waste lands. From 
Meppel to ter Apel and from Groningen almost to 
Koevorden is a stretch of heather. In the middle of 
this stretch is the moorland proper, with villages encir- 
cled by their strip of agricultural lands. The white, 
long-tailed sheep crop here all the year round, while 
the shepherds knit stockings as they tend them, and 
swarms of bees are brought to make honey in the 
heather when the colza season is over. It is impos- 
sible for one who has not seen it in the rainy season 
to imagine the desolateness of this moorland, when 
from the soft, slaggy roads the sodden heather stretches 
away like a vast foreshore of seaweed left by the tide ; 
with tawny patches, and muddy and sandy hollows, 
and pools, and inland seas with rippling waves, and 
birch clumps here and there that loom like headlands 
through the mists. Beyond these sandy heaths, and 
also heather-covered when undug, are the high-fens, 
the famous peat-lands. On moorland and fen, forests 




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46 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

once existed. In time they disappeared. On the 
moorland sand, they were cut for fuel or for building, 
fires blasted them, the northwest winds overturned 
them, the cattle turned out upon the ground stopped 
the growth of the younger timber. In the undrained, 
moister stretches, fen began to form. The roots of 
the oaks rotted, the great trees fell and lay, as they 
are found to this day, pointing to the southeast. Firs 
followed the oaks, and birches and alders the firs, — 
all of them to destruction ; and then in place of trees 
came the undergrowth and the grasses and reeds. 
The rotting vegetation fed the fen, and a brown, gloomy 
marsh covered half a province. There were no roads 
across it. The villages on this side and on that were 
cut off from each other by weary, desolate, trackless 
regions, shunned by animals and untrodden by rnen. 
Such, three hundred years ago, was the fen that 
stretched unbroken from near Groningen down the 
east of Drente to its southeast border, and encircled 
the moorland fringes of Friesland and Overysel. There 
are tracts of it here and there in Drente still to aid the 
fancy in picturing how this whole region looked a 
century or two ago. But except in them, you would 
not dream that desolation ever brooded over it, for 
the marshes are reclaimed and under the greenest of 
green crops, the canals that intersect them are 
crowded, and in the long streets of the fen colonies 
there Is stir and traffic. This is one of the wonders of 
Holland. 

North of Groningen, the land slopes down with a 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 47 

sweep to the west to the Friesland meadows, and 
northwards over the fat wheat-fields. There we are 
no longer in the highlands, but once more in the 
polders, from which we look across the oozy waters of 
the VVadden to the old line of dunes on the islands 
beyond. 



IV 



These physical and other conditions are not without 
a further consequence, to be kept in view by the 
visitor to Holland. In choosing the western strip, he 
has selected the richest part of the Netherlands, the 
portion most flourishing and most populous, inhabited 
by the finest races, and most closely associated with 
the valiant deeds of the great wars. The cities of the 
lowlands bred the artists and scholars ; the seaports, 
the navigators and great captains. It is in the prov- 
inces of Friesland, the Hollands, and Zeeland that you 
find the most splendid types of men. The seafaring 
life, and contact with it, widen the horizon of the 
mind. When we come to the sandy grounds we are 
aware of a drop in the plane of intelligence that 
appears evident even to the casual traveller ignorant 
of the statistics that are made to prove it so. As far 
as the education returns can speak, the provinces in 
the west and north are the most highly developed. 
On the other hand, did we follow statistics, we might 
conclude that in the scale of morality. North- and 
South-Holland are lower than the south and the east 



48 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

with their duller and patient workers on the sand; all 
that is true, possibly, is that into the west part of the 
country, where most of the large cities are, there stream 
the social and moral wrecks. In the same way, statis- 




A Zeeland Girl. 



tics may be manipulated to support that theory of the 
superiority of Friesland of which one hears a great 
deal too much. 

The Frisians, now confined within a corner of the 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 49 

extreme north of the country, originally inhabited 
the greater part of modern Holland. Their territory 
stretched from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth 
of the Eems ; they have left traces of an occupation 
beyond these limits. Northwards, we find the name 
of North Friesland still given to the strip of clay that 
lies to the west of Sleeswijk. In the south, in West 
Flanders, they have left a mark upon the language ; 
and across the Schelde, in the islands of Zeeland, feat- 
ures and family names, and names of places, habits 
and customs, and costumes, and the system of land 
divisions, testify to Frisian blood. The Saxons held 
the east, — speaking very generally, the present 
Drente and Overysel, — mixing with the Frisians in 
the north, and in the south with the Franks. These, 
again, held the south, and swept westwards to the 
borders of Zeeland, and northward over South-Holland 
and Utrecht, and merged with the Frisians, on their 
southern borders there. On the modern map of Hol- 
land, the widest tract of the Province of North-Hol- 
land, where it shoots into the Zuider Zee at Enkhuizen, 
is named West Friesland. In any map of Holland 
before the thirteenth century, however, we will not 
find any Zuider Zee. The provinces of North-Holland 
and Friesland were one, traversed by the Ysel and 
the Vlie. When, in the inundations of the thirteenth 
century, the low lands on these rivers fell in, and the 
Zuider Zee came into existence, Friesland was cut in 
two. Towards the end of the century, the western 
portion, the present West Friesland, was made subject 

4 



50 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

to the counts of Holland. But it did not cease to 
regard itself as Frisian. Naturally, it was in the towns 
that the Prankish influence gained ground. In the 
country, on the other hand, Frisian sentiment pre- 
vailed. As far south as the Waterland and in the 
valley of the Zaan, and even in the Amstelland, the 
Frisian laws remained in force. As late as 1600, 
the Frisian language was spoken. And we shall find 
that up to the end of the Republic, it is always the 
Stadhouder and States of Holland and West Fries- 
land that are spoken of. Meanwhile, on the eastern 
side of the gap, in the present Friesland, the people 
cut off from the influence of the Franks preserved 
their character of Free Fries more entirely than ever 
they could have done had not the waters burst in 
upon them. Even now they remain in some sense 
a people by themselves, with a language that after 
twelve hundred years of separation remains more like 
our own than any other is. That *' Butter, Bread, and 
Cheese is good English and good Fries" is almost 
literally true. The Hollander understands Frisian in 
proportion as he understands English, and it is said 
tliat Scots drovers in Frisian markets have little diffi- 
culty in making themselves comprehended. All this 
may very well be, however, without convincing us of 
a special fineness and pride in the Frisian race ; nor 
is any conviction to be extracted from the fact that 
the Frisian himself is quite assured of the superiority. 
That he salutes you, when you enter his country, with 
a '* Have you come from Holland? " implying thereby 




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52 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

more than a mere distinction of province, is only a 
proof that the Holland provinces and Zeeland are the 
true nucleus of the country. Groningen, Drente, Lim- 
burg, and Brabant still make the same distinction. 

Still, there is left a core of pure Fries. It is not to 
be found any longer in the towns. The teaching in 
the schools and the Bible are driving it farther in 
upon the country. But it is there. Indeed, the dis- 
tinction of the three races — the Frisian, the Frank, 
the Saxon — is so marked that a Dutch geographer 
has mapped out the spheres of their influence in 
Holland to this day. The sea-clay in the north, 
from Alkmaar to beyond the Dollard, and almost all 
the low-fen country in Friesland and Overysel ; the 
country parts of Waterland and Amstelland ; the 
islands of Walcheren, Schouwen, and Duiveland., in 
Zeeland, the shores of the Holland Diep, and the land 
of Axel, in Dutch Flanders: that is the Frisian sphere. 
The Saxon, he says, is found on the highlands of 
the east, upon the banks of the river Ysel, and in the 
country to the east of Het Gooi ; the Frank, upon 
the river-clay in Gelderland, and the country to the 
south of the old Ysel and the Waal, upon the Rhine 
and Maas diluvium, on the polders between the Dutch 
Ysel and the Merwede, and round Rotterdam, and in 
the river-clay round Utrecht. We shall see, later, 
where the races have met and merged ; and we shall 
find curious cases of small areas, occupied by one, set 
plump in the midst of a country of the other. But 
within the limits we have drawn, roughly but suggest- 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 53 

ively, arc the spheres of the three races; and if we 
wish for towns as centres and hearts of these spheres, 
— keeping in view the impossibihty of any town pre- 
serving its pnrity of race, — then we are given Leeu- 
warden as the type of Frieshand, Deventer and Zwolle 
as typical of the Saxon, and ]Jtn Bosch, the town of 
the Franks. 

This, undoubtedly, is to indulge the Teutonic craze 
for classifications. According to it, we ought to find 
in the maritime, the eastern, and the soutliern provinces 
three clear, well-defined types. The Frisians, we are 
told; are tall, large in frame and fine in the bone, with 
long, well-shaped limbs and toes and fingers; narrows- 
shouldered, full and long in the neck, narrow-jawed, 
brilliantly-fair in complexion, soft in the skin, and grey 
in the eyes. The women are handsome, red-cheeked, 
and tall and slight in figure. As a race they are sharp 
and eager, proud of their nationality, but liberal-minded 
and ambitious, active, fond of feasts and games, simple, 
frank, hot-tempered and easily forgiving, orderly but 
hateful of oppression, with a turn for practical science 
rather than for the Fine Arts, agriculturists, sea-farers 
and fishers rather than manufacturers, and by choice 
engaging in commerce rather than in industry. The 
Saxons, again, are broader, squatter, coarser in bone 
and firmer of flesh ; fairer, with bright blue eyes ; 
milder and less acute. They are the manufacturers, 
not the fishermen and sailors of Holland. Lastly, there 
are the darker, olive-skinned, grosser, and uglier 
Franks, with gentle, generous natures, strongly attached 



54 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

to old things, tillers of the soil, seldom rearers of cat- 
tle ; clever in industries, naturally apt in the routine of 
official employment and in the service of the Fine Arts. 
In this manner, some of our Teutonic guides sort out 
the races. The visitor to Holland, it need not be said, 
sees no such distinctions, though he easily imagines 
that he does if he has learned his lesson well. For a 
little time in recent years there was a good deal of dis- 
turbance in Friesland, and Socialism, the bogy of the 
Dutch rentiers y seeined to be rearing its head danger- 
ously. The rioting arose out of the agricultural de- 
pression and the want of work already referred to ; and 
it disproved the Frisian's instinct for order quite as 
much as it corroborated his hatred of injustice and op- 
pression. The Frisian, again, is described as fond of 
cattle-rearing. But in our geographer's allotment, the 
Zeeland islands are given to the Frisians, and there we 
do not find cattle-rearing, but tillage, and one of the 
State acrriculturalists assured me that that was not on 
account of the soil but because of a natural dislike of 
the people to the occupation. It is true that in Over- 
ysel, the country alleged of the Saxons, there is the 
great industry of Twente, corresponding with that of 
Westphalia, and that it derived its origin from the 
never resting wheels and clattering looms of the farm- 
houses. The people of the southern provinces, it may 
be admitted, show a Frankish attachment to things old 
by their adherence to the Catholic Church. One looks 
suspiciously on these corroborations of generalisations 
as to race; and it is safer to be content with local 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 55 

peculiarities and characteristics observed in the course 
of visits made to this province and to that without 
straining after classifications. In the upper and middle 
classes in Holland there is a great infusion of foreign 
blood by marriage. To this, no doubt, is due in part 
the cosmopolitanism of the Dutchman. We must re- 
member the continual migration to the north from the 
loyal provinces during the War of Eighty Years; the 
flocking of the Huguenots to the United Provinces 
after 1685 ; and, later, the close connection with 
France, which had an influence that plainly exists still. 
When the stranger turns from the upper classes to the 
peasantry in search of physical peculiarities of race, 
his observations are at once disturbed by the variations 
of costumes. For him, the distinctions lie in the hel- 
mets of Friesland, the caps of Brabant, the kerchiefs 
and petticoats of the islands in the southwest. If he is 
struck by any one type more than another, it is most 
likely by the swarthy faces of Zeeland, popularly 
accounted for by the long Spanish occupation. Spe- 
cial characteristics in the people, attributable to their 
occupation and the soil they live on, seem clear 
enough. With us, the clever, rather selflsh, rather 
shrewd, radical, weaving population, humble when 
under the hand but self-assertive upon the least relax- 
ation of its grip, cannot compare in manly virtues with 
our fishermen and farmers. So no doubt it is in Hol- 
land. There, noticeably, the dwellers on the sand are 
duller than the dwellers on the clay; and it is com- 
monly held that the farmers everywhere have less 




A Fisher-Child of Scheveningen. 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 57 

character than the still plainer, bluffer, prouder, and 
more reserved people of the sea. Sir WiUiam Temple 
noted the difference in his day, and accounted for it 
by the heartier food of the fishermen and mariners as 
well as by their isolated lives and the elements they 
passed them in. Want of success in their occupation 
and consequent decline in the heartiness of their food 
may account for the beggarliness of certain of the fish- 
ing communities now. It must be said that there are 
show places, such as Marken and Scheveningen, sub- 
jected to the corrupting influence of thoughtless, lar- 
gesse-giving tourists; but Volendam also is a haunt of 
the tourist, yet no breaking down of self-respect and 
pride is to be discovered there. 

It is a common belief that Scotland gives an excel- 
lent line wherewith to measure Holland. There are 
many points of similarity between the two peoples. 
The resemblance in the languages seems the greater 
that the guttural sounds common to both are precisely 
those that notoriously gravel the Englishman. No 
Dutchman has any difficulty in saying Auchtermuchty. 
On the other hand, the cockney ought to find himself 
at home in the islands of Zeeland, for there the // is 
dropped with great assiduity. This is the case also, I 
believe, in a little colony on the Buchan coast, which 
suggests an interesting speculation. In the matter of 
actual words, too, there is a considerable similarity be- 
tween Dutch and Scots; that is to say, good broad 
Scots will often help to an understanding between a 
Dutchman and a Scot who know no language save 



58 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

their own. In the same pass between an Englishman 
and a Dutchman an understanding could never be 
arrived at. There are constant surprises of identical 
words in Scots and Dutch, the meaning of which is 
hid from one born south of the Tweed. He would not 
understand the Dutchman's complaint that he is suffer- 
ing from a hoestox his invitation to a game at the dam- 
bord. The resemblance, of course, is not always so 
noticeable in the printed word, but in the spoken it is 
clear, and often delightful. You are walking with a 
Dutch acquaintance in the meadows and a lark soars 
up from your feet. Your Dutch companion halts and 
points upwards to the bird. *' A laverok," he says. 
And spoken thus, the word is a delightful surprise. 
As far as type goes — though as has been said it is 
rather misleading to speak of a Dutch type — - the re- 
semblance is more noticeable in pictures than in the 
living crowds around one. In pictures, also, the na- 
tional or local peculiarity of costume is distracting; 
still, when we compare, as we instinctively do, painters 
like Ostade and Brouwer with our Sir David Wilkie, 
we find the similarity pretty evident. The scenes de- 
picted by Wilkie are marvellously refined beside those 
in the canvases of Teniers and Ostade, but we must 
remember that the Dutch painters were more nearly 
the contemporaries of the poet Dunbar than of Wilkie. 
The frank, honest, unrefined calling of a spade a spade, 
the pride of family and the taste for an '' ell of genea- 
logy," the virtue or vice of savingness, the fluctuation 
between the sober and reserved humour of the work- 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 59 

a-day hours and a boisterous hilarity in feasts and 
hohdays, the good housewifery of the well-to-do family, 
the forms of the religious services, — all these traits 
of present-day Holland had their counterpart in old 
Scotland. 

When, however, the Scot in Holland passes from 
these more or less superficial resemblances to a com- 
parison between the two people in deeper matters, he 
is immediately arrested (or he ought to be), not by a 
want of knowledge of the Dutch, which remains as a 
further difficulty, but by the uncertainty of his knowl- 
edge of the Scots. Many readers in Holland, it is 
pleasant to find, are deriving enjoyment from the works 
of Ian Maclaren. But when they ask us, *' Are your 
villages really so? Are your people really so naive? " 
the definiteness of our conclusions about our own 
villages and their inhabitants begins to smudge. It is 
all very well at home, where the reverse of the picture 
is at least partially understood, to reply, "No, emphat- 
ically no ; " but I think that a fair-minded native of 
Scotland would be too proud of an underlying truth- 
fulness in the Drumtochty sketches to deny it so im- 
moderately to a foreigner. To a foreigner, interested 
in Scotland through Drumtochty, he would reply that 
the Scots are a spiritual people, or were, or partially 
were, or partially are, — he is not certain which; and, 
indeed, on soul or conscience it would not be difficult 
for him to defend the proposition that the Scots are 
the most irreligious people in the world. He may 
very well refrain, then, from carrying the comparison 



6o HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

of the Dutch and the Scots peasantry, tempting as 
the experiment is, into the regions of religion and 
morals. Nor, with the spectacle before his eyes of 
Scotland gone into violently opposing camps over an 
estimate of her national poet, will he be surprised to 
fmd the Hollanders themselves uncertain guides to the 
condition of their people. When the Dutch Ian Mac- 
laren appears, — and Holland is a luxuriant kail-yard — 
he is not likely to unite all the opinions of his country- 
men. "The peasants are the finest class in our coun- 
try" — so a distinguished Dutchman said to me once. 
"Are your people deeply religious?" I asked a 
country Dominee of the Reformed Church. " On 
Sunday — yes," was his reply, echoing Beets. '/ Their 
curse is gin," I have been assured fifty times. As has 
been seen, there is a pretty general belief that they are 
lazy. I have been assured with impressive earnest- 
ness that they are over-reaching and that they are in- 
describably licentious. In most cases, it was evident 
my informant could not detach his mind from special 
examples immediately under his notice. One must 
fall back on his own observation, not straining its 
worth. In material condition, the peasant does not 
seem degraded. The knecJit, the unmarried farm- 
servant, lives in the house of his master, with not too 
large a wage, and with plenty of good food. The 
married workers, the arbeiders, live in the neighbouring 
villages. Some are odd hands, but most are vaste 
arbeiders, with work all the year round. Wages vary. 
The lowest, I am told, are paid in the Achterhoek of 




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62 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

Gelderland, and speaking generally wages rise as Am- 
sterdam is neared. The housing of the people is not 
everywhere so clean and orderly as in the lowlands. 
In many parts of the higher lands the untidiness is 
more than agreeably picturesque, and I have been sur- 
prised at the squalor found even in the Betuwe. Most 
peasants have a patch of ground, and a pig or two, and 
some receive these in addition to their wages. All are 
paid by the day. A farmer in the Betuwe, who had 
many fine acres and kept a foreman, told me that he was 
paying two ploughmen i^. 8^. a day all the year round, 
and that his vaste arb eiders had i^. per day in winter 
and i^. ^d. in summer, and one seventh of a hectare 
of land in potatoes, manured and ploughed. That, I 
gather, is above the average. \\\ the fen colonies in the 
north the workers are in the field from five in the morn- 
ing until six at night, with intervals of an hour and two 
half-hours for dinner and coffee. They breakfast be- 
fore going to work, take dinner at ten, and drink cofTee 
in the afternoon. That is the usual course ; but in 
many parts of the country they go to work and leave 
it with the sun. On the other hand, it is admitted 
that they do not work very hard. The boers gener- 
ally dine at mid-day, drink tea in the afternoon, and 
sup on bread and butter. As we have seen, frequently 
there is little distinction between them and their ser- 
vants. For the special work of hay-making and har- 
vesting the polder farmers employ casual labour from 
the poorer districts ; the workers of the Langstraat 
in Brabant, for example, harvest in the Haarlemmer 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 63 

Meer, finding a lodging in the barns. Actual want is 
rare among the peasants. They are almost invariably 
polite, touch their caps to you when you meet them, 
and have a ready Goc n Dag ! or Goe n aovond saonien ! 
on their lips. As a rule they are not well-educated or 
well-informed ; yet I have engaged in conversation the 
son of a small farmer, a mere crofter indeed, and found 
that he spoke English and French fluently^ A great 
gap separates them, as it separates the boers, their 
employers, from the other classes in the country. 
Judging from many examples of quickness and intelli- 
gence among them, one would venture to assert that 
they are not given the opportunities for improvement 
which they are very well able to make good use of 
On three hundred and sixty-four days of the year they 
may be peaceful, sober, and well-doing, and no doubt 
generally are; but the tale of their iniquity on Kermis 
day is not to be told. 



All this variety of scenery and interests the visitor 
can see for himself, without any indecent scampering, 
in a fortnight or three weeks. When Li Hung was 
making his tour of impertinent questions in 1896, he 
asked (it is said), on reaching The Hague, how far he 
was from the sea, and was told half-an-hour. " Then 
your country must be a very small one," he said, " for 
I have travelled from the eastern frontier in three 



64 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

hours." To which the minister promptly answered, 
"Yes, it is narrow; but if you were to travel from 
north to south it would take you three days." In 
reality Holland is only twice the size of Yorkshire, 
and not a third the size of Cuba. The longest direct 
line drawn across it can be covered comfortably in a 
day. One can press to its extremest borders without 
losing touch of the cities and large towns, with such 
accessories of a luxurious civilisation as they possess. 
There are, perhaps, out-of-the-way corners, in Drente 
for example, where it will be comforting to know one- 
self in touch thus; but I have not found them. In 
all the country towns and villages we stopped at 
(save one, and from it we might have escaped but for 
the landlord's entertaining gossip), the experiment of 
putting up for the night carried with it no risk even of 
discomfort. Of course, we did not look to have the 
Times warmed for us in the morning. A spotless 
cleanliness we did expect everywhere, however, ac- 
cording to all travellers' tales. Concerning that, a 
young Dutch workman in the steam-car between Alk- 
maar and De Rijp — that clean polder country — re- 
marked very naively, " Sometimes the people here are 
so taken up with cleaning their windows and coppers 
that they forget about themselves"! — but he had 
been in the United States. And then he discussed his 
people's personal habits with a frankness of detail that 
even residence in the refined atmosphere of St. Louis 
had not made him understand would be uncomfortable 
to our ears. The Dutch, though prudish in some 




Q a 






Ph 



66 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

things, in most are singularly frank. The dividing 
line of the indelicate varies with every country, and 
nothing is more amusing than to see Englishmen and 
women look down their noses, when their side of 
the line is encroached upon, quite unconscious that a 
minute or two before they themselves had blundered 
over the other side. The contempt of the Briton for 
the foreigner is a form of insolence that may not be 
without its value when confined to his own islands, 
but face to face with the foreigner, exhibitions of it 
are very pitiable. One evening a year or two ago, on 
the Dam-plein of Amsterdam, I fell in with a profes- 
sional gentleman, a countryman of my own. He had 
just arrived from The Hague, of which he remembered 
nothing very accurately without consulting a note- 
book. A reference to this travelling companion of his 
(on a chance remark of mine) discovered that he had 
actually visited the Maurits Huis without seeing any 
Rembrandts. Paul Potter's " Bull" was noted, but not 
the "Lesson in Anatomy." Yet will it be believed 
that, as we strolled through Amsterdam, my compan- 
ion, who, remember, had passed without observing it, 
the finest thing in the country, and one of the greatest 
pictures in the world, enlarged (to use his own word) 
upon the benighted ways of " this strange people " ! 

The personal uncleanliness of the Dutch is an old 
slander. An examination of Dutch houses shows that 
their cleanliness at least is not merely superficial. 
Here is no case of the Japanese room, so immaculate 
until the mats are turned over. Public sanitation is 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 67 

not perfect. In a country so flat as Holland is, it is 
necessarily a difficult problem, but it is not tackled as 
it might be. There is no good reason for some of the 
waters in Rotterdam, — the Maurits Kade, for example 
— being allowed to become so malodorous; and it is 
notorious that The Hague and Delft are allowed to 
stink in summer rather than that Scheveningen, the 
watering-place on the coast to which these cities are 
drained, should be sullied. But the Dutch are indub- 
itably, aggressively, a cleanly people. Their cleanli- 
ness is more apparent than their godliness, and they 
are more than clean. They have a word, the equiva- 
lent of our " neat." It is nctjcs (pronounced net-yes), 
and its sound — or so it seems to me — conveys some- 
thing of its meaning. The Dutch are nctjcs. 

A Dutch town in the early morning is a scene of 
amusing activity. Milk is being delivered from carts 
drawn by dogs yoked underneath them. Dogs are in 
constant use in Holland as beasts of burden. There 
is, I have heard, a law against their being employed 
to draw human beings; but dogs with lolling tongues 
and wobbling gait carrying their masters from market 
is as common a sight as klinker bricks on a Dutch 
country road. The barrels from which the milk is 
drawn are of painted wood, and, of course, are bright 
with brass mountings. After the milk come country 
carts with vegetables; sometimes small ones drawn by 
dogs, a woman holding on by the cart-handles ; but 
more often broad, low carts drawn by horses, set 
round with hooks from which hang the baskets of 



68 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

cauliflower, salad, and peas and beans of bewildering 
variety. A man perched in front attends to the horse ; 
it is the woman, for whom a seat is provided which 
projects beyond the tail-board, who does the bargain- 
ing from house to house. Frequently, the vegetables 
are not bought by weight, but by the maaltje, that is, 
by the '^ meal." '* Peas and carrots for five persons," 
says the housewife; whereupon the woman spreads 
upon a flat basket the required maaltje^ and ofl'ers it 
for such and such a price. Then the haggling begins, 
and the price is lowered, or else a more liberal allow- 
ance is conceded for the five persons. Animation is 
lent to the scene the while by the bustling and chat- 
tering of the maid-servants who are busy on the pave- 
ment in front of the house with pail and mop and 
glazen spuit. The glazen spidt is a large brass squirt 
that sends the water sluicing about the window-panes 
and the outside window-shutters ; it is in constant use 
in Holland, although the hose must take its place 
eventually, now that water^is being "laid on" in the 
houses of most big towns. If the house does not 
boast a glazen spiiit, a wooden ladle or a cup must 
do instead. The maids work these utensils industri- 
ously, bending over the red and green pails, their 
blue and heliotrope wrappers uniformly tucked up, 
displaying uniformly ungainly ankles in loose white 
cotton stockings above wooden shoes. There they 
are out in the street, splashing in all directions ! The 
work that in England is carried on at the back of the 
house, where open windows flying rugs and mats are 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 69 

a melancholy disfigurement, in Holland is done in 
the public street. The Dutch have regard for their 




A Dutch Interior. 
From a drawing by Johannes Bosboom, 

neat flower-beds in the garden behind — which, save 
in the case of some workmen's houses, is never as 



70 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

in England used as a bleaching green, and called a 
lawn ; possibly, too, the veranda giving upon it is 
already occupied by some of the household. Hence 
this extraordinary clatter and bustle in the streets — 
until ten o'clock ; by that hour, all such work must 
be over, if the law is obeyed. Mr. Mylius, a German, 
in a little book published some years ago, described 
his arrival in Rotterdam on a Friday morning when 
cleaning had begun. The stair-carpets were being 
beaten — stair-carpets are not tacked down in Hol- 
land ; they are beaten too often for that. In front of 
almost every house he observed a wooden screen, 
over which the narrow carpets were thrown, while 
the servants beat them with carpet-beaters. The car- 
pet lay rolled up in a kind of box, and as it was 
carried over the screen and beaten was coiled into 
another box. I must say I never saw this. Mr. 
Mylius was writing of twenty years ago, but I cannot 
believe that an arrangement so netjes has been allowed 
to disappear. The same writer says also that from 
each house there issued as a rule an older and a 
younger servant, who wore tight-fitting caps that 
gave to their faces (which weren't pretty as a rule) 
a fresh and piquant look. The cap so described may 
have been the Amsterdam kornet, to be looked for 
almost in vain upon a maid-servant's head nowadays ; 
though if any old baker — the old type of monthly 
nurse - — still remains, she will be found wearing 
it. This kornet, generally of lace, is ''gauffered" 
in front (I am instructed that this is the technical 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 71 

term), and has a piece of lace behind covering the 
neck, and a white ribbon crossed over and round 
the head, and fastened with pins. It was at one time 
a head-dress pccuhar to the women in the households 
of Dutch clergymen: in the earlier stage his wife wore 
it; in a later, the nurse-maid. It entailed the hiding 
of the hair, if not the cutting of it, and disappeared 
when the serving-maids discovered that their hair 
might be becoming. The peasant women almost all 
over Holland wear a head-dress that hides the hair; 
as soon as they also discover that the hair is one of 
the attractions of womankind, these head -costumes 
will disappear, we may suppose. 

The Dutch maid-servant is a patient and hard-work- 
ing hewer of wood and drawer of water. She dresses 
according to her position, and is praised therefor; 
no doubt justly. If she is never so smart as the 
English maid who answers your knock of an after- 
noon, she never is a slut in the morning, as the 
English maid too often is. She preserves a decent 
mean at all hours. It does not occur to her to risk 
missing the mail with your letters while she dons her 
hat and m.uff. Still, one's approval of this excellent 
theory of dressing in accordance with your position 
is rather insincere ; we do not really feel any increase 
of respect for those who put it rigidly into practice. 
The Dutch maid seems to be too contented in her 
servitude. She would be all the better for a little 
audacity in following the fashion. So, perhaps, would 
her mistress. But to hazard this ooinion is, for a mere 




A Woman of Dutch Flanders. 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 73 

man, to be temerarious, and he will do better to be 
the mouth-piece only of the opinion of the mistresses. 
These do not deny the activity in the morning and 
indeed, at all times, but declare, nevertheless, that the 
Dutch maid does not get through so much work as 
the English. Moreover, so they say, she is not as she 
used to be: she is more difficult to get and more diffi- 
cult to please. In the larger towns, and in The Hague 
especially, she dresses like her mistress, and possibly 
outshines her at the Kurhaus. All over the country 
she must now be addressed as /uffronw (miss), instead 
of as the incisjc (girl) or as the vrijstcr (literally, sweet- 
heart) of old. This is rather an interesting point. 
The three titles of address for a married woman are 
incvronw\ Jujfrouiv, and vroiruu. The distinction is 
subtle. A lady is mcvrouzv. Between her and the 
vronw, somewhere, comes the indefinable juffroiiw. 
Such at one time was the wife of the clergyman, — 
juffrouw pastoorschc, she was called, in the days, no 
doubt, when it became her to wear the koriict. The 
unmarried noblewoman — the daughter of a baron, or 
o{ 2i jonkheer — is -^ frcitlc ; the unmarried lady-com- 
moner is jiiffroiLW. But sometimes, now that the 
maid-servant is 3X9^0 juffrouw, the young and sensitive 
daughter of the house, though a commoner, likes to 
be addressed by tradesmen, and sometimes is by her 
equals, diS frcule ; it is not unknown for the servants 
in a family to be instructed to address the boys as 
jonkJicer and the girls as frcule — this in a country 
where a man, as likely as not, would refuse a title, 



74 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

claiming that his patronymic which had been held in 
a plain respect for a generation or two required no 
adornment. But these contrasts in character and con- 
duct jostle one another in Holland continually. 

Despite this seeming rise in the social status of the 
domestic servant, her wages do not appear to increase. 
In a middle-class family, a housemaid is paid about 
;^8 a year; a cook perhaps ^lO. To this, however, 
has to be added the verval. Verval is derived from a 
variety of sources. The discounts allowed by trades- 
people are recognised perquisites of the servants : so 
much so that if on occasion the lady of the house 
settles the bill, the discount is handed to her with the 
request that it be passed on to the maids. Then at 
New Year and at the kermis, a stated proportion of the 
wage, generally five per cent, is given as a present. 
Tips are numerous. If you dine at a friend's house, 
you slip into the servant's hand on leaving a guilder or 
two ; in some places a less formal entertainment than 
dinner is sufficient excuse for bestowing a tip. You 
could not in Holland ride away from a line of grinning 
faces, as did the Fife laird who merely tickled the 
palms of the domestics which he was supposed to be 
oiling. I cannot imagine the Dutch servant seeing 
the joke of having the " loof kittled " only. As a rule, 
these perquisites are put into a common box, some- 
times under the control of the mistress, to be equally 
divided later. There is no false sentiment in the 
matter. In negotiating for a situation the servant 
stipulates that verval up to a certain sum shall be 
guaranteed. 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 75 

The inside of the house, of course, is scrubbed 
and poHshed even more than the outside. I could 
wish that some of our housewives, in all ranks, 
could see a real Dutch kitchen: white-washed spot- 
lessly, the walls tiled, the floors of tile or of brick from 
the coldness of which the maids' feet are guarded by 
wooden platforms, the ware ranged in cupboards behind 
glass-doors, the whole bright place radiant with brass, 
from the handles of the pump to the soup-skimmer 
and warming-pan behind the dresser. In their houses, 
the Dutch make a use of whitewash as excellent as 
their use of it in their churches is atrocious. The clean 
whitewashed hall of an ordinary house is like a smile 
of welcome. There is a handsome new concert room 
in Amsterdam which as yet is only whitewashed, and 
I do not think that, at night at least, paint when it 
comes will be any improvement. The material is 
applied with care and often, and the wind-purged 
atmosphere and an avoidance of open fires preserve 
its purity. The halls of the large houses are of marble, 
cool and delightful in summer, but sometimes repelling 
the visitor by a foreboding of cold entertainment, a 
promise rarely fulfilled. In furnishing and decoration, 
the suite is possibly too stiff: the English eye is dis- 
tressed by the formality and the predilection for vel- 
vet and plush apparent in the house everywhere. 
Yet Dutch interiors are in excellent keeping, with 
colour and ornament rightly disposed. This is as true 
of the dwellings of very ordinary folk as of town 
mansions, like those, say, on the Heeren Gracht in 



'je HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

Amsterdam. Indeed, all over Holland, in the country 
vehicles, — the fine lines on which the carriage pecu- 
liar to the province of Utrecht, the Utrechtsch wagentjey 
is built may be mentioned specially, — in the iron-work 
in the towns, even in small things like the beautiful 
models of some of the wooden shoes, there is notice- 
able a fine application of colour and ornament to 
objects of usefulness. It is true that the humid atmos- 
phere comes to the countryman's aid to tone down the 
crudity of the primary colours he uses, and that much 
of the beautiful workmanship one sees is a relic of a 
notable artistic age, now past; still, hand and eye have 
not lost their cunning. 

Too much is made of the Dutch rage for cleanliness. 
The village of Broek, to which the tourist is sent flying 
by the guides, to see this national virtue in its most 
ridiculous exhibitions, is a standing joke among the 
Hollanders themselves. The explanation of all this 
scrubbing and polishing and painting, as of almost all 
the characteristics of the Dutch, is the superabundance 
of water, the element that has such destructive as well 
as restorative qualities. But the love of the netjes 
which accompanies the cleanliness, and discovers itself 
in the discipline of life as well as in a hundred small 
devices for household comfort and order, is not to be 
so simply accounted for. It would make an interest- 
ing starting-point for speculations as to the character 
of the Dutchman. 



g!^%y^;'i^*jg « ? i^*«w^ t^ j^^ i .j; 




j^\ 




The Heeren Gracht, Amsterdam. 
From a drawing by Pieter Oijens, 



78 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 



VI 



After cleanliness, cooking; and here possibly there 
will be difference in opinion, according to the travel- 
ler's experience, and the standard of the art in his 
own country. The table dWiote of large hotels is beside 
the question. In smaller out-of-the-way inns, however, 
your chance of dining well depends upon the domestic 
virtues of the nation you are among. If you go to a 
good inn in a Dutch country town about five of the 
afternoon, in nine cases out of ten you will find a 
good, well-cooked dinner being served. That is 
explained by the company, — unmarried lawyers 
or officers who dine here night in, night out. The 
failure in the tenth is generally caused by pretentious 
efforts beyond the means or the skill of the cook. 
Upon the family dinner, the only really good ground 
of comparison, greater knowledge and care are be- 
stowed than among ourselves. It is a question of 
head rather than of hand. Maybe in Holland the 
kitchen is easily ruled ; at any rate, the Dutch house- 
wife rules it admirably from her store, which, like her 
linen-press, is not to be matched in other lands. 
Table decoration, on the other hand, is not one of her 
accomplishments : at the ordinary family dinner in 
good Dutch houses there is not the tasteful arrange- 
ment of flowers that makes delightful a greatly less 
elaborate meal in a greatly less pretentious household 
at home. Everything is directed to a grosser comfort. 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 79 

Little elegances are ousted by contrivances, cumber- 
some but always successful, for keeping" multifarious 
dishes warm; and it is curious that with all the finick- 
ing niceness of the Dutch in the preparation of food, 
— and there they give us a lesson, — they may require 
you to cat several courses with the same knife and 
fork. So you will find in many a good hotel. 

The Dutchman to our eyes may not cat prettily, but 
he makes up for that by eating well, according to any- 
body's way of thinking. Such is the general impres- 
sion, and in support of it we have cited to us Master 
Herman, the Prince of Orange's head-cook, and the 
Doelen canvases of Frans Hals and van dcr Heist. 
The conventional picture of the voracious Dutchman, 
like that of the phlegmatic Dutchman, is half true 
only. Phlegmatic Dutchmen there are in plenty; the 
more so that sport does not to the same extent as 
with us engage the leisure of the well-settled classes. 
But in Holland you find a really extraordinary 
vivacity of character. Do not be misled by the 
taciturnity and reserve, and the long silences behind 
clouds of tobacco smoke : they are an index, not to 
sluggishness of mind, but to active brains and a steady 
purpose directed upon a fixed ambition, and not to 
be turned from it for a moment. When the goal is 
reached, the Dutchman may sit in comfortable con- 
templation of his triumph, — but that is not to be 
phlegmatic. So, too, we are not to be led by the 
evidence of a feast-day to believe that all Dutchmen 
find their greatest pleasures those of the table. In 



8o HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 



their eating they are careful about quality, but gener- 
ally simple and sparing. The Dutch breakfast is a 
mere affair of tea and bread and butter; the Dutch 
luncheon, of little more than coffee, as its usual name 
oi koffie drinken Implies. With both, eggs and cheese 
are frequently served. De Amicis, who has written 
so delightfully of Holland, jusdy praises the Dutch 
cheese, " wherein," he says, " when 
once you have thrust your knife 
you can never leave off until you 
have excavated the whole, 
^:C^^^^, while desire still hovers over 
the shell." The visitor to 
Holland will do well not to 




let his enthusiasm run to these 
depths. A Dutch hostess must have 
her cheese cut straight. " Die inijn 
kaas snijdt als een scJmit, die jaag ik 
mijii deur iiit,'' they say in Hol- 
land: " Whoso cuts my cheese like 
a boat, him I send out of my house." 
In their afternoon calls ladies may 
drink a glass of sherry or madeira, but that custom is 
going out, and '* afternoon tea" is beginning to come in. 
With the gentlemen the hour before dinner is sacred to 
the borreltje, — a diminutive circumlocution for the 
plain fact " gin and bitters." Then the eafe and the 
club or Societeit are crowded and lively. Dinner is at 
any hour from five to seven. The quality of the beef 
in Holland is not of the best, but almost always it is 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 8i 

well-cooked and well-served. There is little mutton 
used. Fish is generally good, but rather difficult to get. 
Plaice and soles and other flat fish are brought round 
for sale alive, and when bought are killed and cleaned 
at the door by the fishseller. Salmon is served immedi- 
ately before the game, and game is plentiful and good. 
To De Amicis, w^ine seemed dear, but it is not really so, 
and excellent claret and hock are found on the family 
table. The crown of the dinner, of course, is the vege- 
tables, cooked according to the national recipe,'* Do not 
spare the butter," and the Dutchman eats great quanti- 
ties of them. All through dinner, indeed, he discovers 
himself a good trencherman. But he is not a gourmand. 
The truth is that he has earned his reputation of being 
a great eater by his delight in special feasts, — a delight 
in the viands, no doubt, but quite as much in the social 
and festive spirit of the occasion. The Dutch are a 
homely people, though their homeliness is blent with 
formality, even as their sentimentality is blent with a 
curious hardness. They cultivate simple joys. At their 
little dinner-parties you have excellent cooking, excel- 
lent wine, fine old silver and ware, and ancient-visaged 
waiters in white cotton gloves with loore fingers-tips ; 
but the guests do not dress for dinner, and when they 
rise from the table they carry away with them sweets 
or bonbons for the children at home. I have little 
doubt that this kindly habit of carrying home to the 
children some memento of an outing in which they 
have not shared accounts for the extraordinary number 
of local confections and sv/eets that have a reputation 

6 



82 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

all over the country: Amsterdamsche korstjes, Haar- 
lemnier halletjes, Haarlemsche roode letter's (can they 
have anything to do with Laurens Koster?), HaagscJic 
hopjes, Utrechtsche tJieerandjcs, Goiidsche sprits, Deventer 
koeky Nijmeegsche nioppeii, and krakelingen, salt and 
sweet, from I know not all where. A people of simple 
joys ! Thus it is natural that things to eat and things 
to drink accompany the expression of their manyy^V/- 
citaties. They congratulate you when your second- 
cousin publishes a novel, or when 3^our niece's baby ' 
is ** shortened," or on your own birthday and half-a- 
dozen other events you would rather not remember; 
and births and betrothals, marriages, an upward step 
in life, promotion to a university degree — all have 
their little feasts and particular ceremonies. In some 
families, it is still the custom to eat " biscuits and 
mice" at a birth, — the mice, sugared caraway-seeds, 
smooth if a girl is born, rough if a boy. There is no 
bride's cake at a marriage, but there are briiidsuikers, 
or marriage sweets, which are tied up in square white 
bags, lettered '* From bride and bridegroom " and 
fastened with red and green sarsanet ribbon (red, the 
colour of love, and green, of hope), and are given to 
the children of friends and relations. Sometimes when 
there is a marriage among the country folks, the guests 
drive out, scattering the bruidsuikers among the village 
children. A friend tells me that at a marriage of a 
workman, a beverage called bruidstranen (bride's tears), 
a liqueur with little gold scales floating in it, was 
handed round, and seemed to be looked upon as the 










n M' P'^ 



«:. ■ I m J-^-^l 







An Amsterdam Apple Woman. 
From a drawing by B. Leon de Laguna. 



84 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

correct thing. Then there are the pojfertjes and the 
wafels of the kermis, — bat the mysteries of the Dutch 
kermis require a paragraph all to themselves. On New 
Year's Eve in most houses you will find people eating 
bohtssen with punch, or appelbollen and bisschop. Bolus- 
sen is a syrupy cake called after a man named Bolus 
who sold it in green tins on the university steps at 
Leiden, and appelbollen en bisschop are covered apples 
and spiced claret; but why the claret is called bisschop 
I do not know any more than why French brandy, 
eggs, sugar, and nutmeg when mixed together are 
called advokaat. It does not matter very much. All 
these things are interesting only as peeps into the 
simple and homely social life of Holland, — a social life 
that is being modified by influences which are busy in 
Holland as elsewhere, but that still exists in places 
where modern veneer is unknown. 

The pleasant instinct in the Dutch to celebrate 
seasons and anniversaries finds its happiest chance at 
Sint Nicolaas. What Santa Claus does for our chil- 
dren on Christmas Eve, Sint Nicolaas does for the 
children of Holland on the night of the Fifth of 
December. On that day the Englishman in Holland 
could fancy himself fallen plump into the Christmas 
season at home. Even if he is merely passing through 
it, and is bound by no ties of family, the shop win- 
dows, stocked as those at home will be three weeks 
later with good cheer, deceive him into the belief that 
Christmas has come by the jovial glare they cast on 
the cold pavement without. The delusion is complete 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 85 

if he has the good fortune to be a guest in a Dutch 
household. The children, indeed, do not hang up 
stockings which over night are to be swollen through 
Santa Claus' beneficence, but they do something very 
similar. Before going off to bed, each leaves boots 
and shoes in the chimney-corner behind the stove, 
singing the while, — 

" Sint NWlaas Kapoentje 
Gooi wat ifi i>iijn scJiocntjej 
Gooi wat in 7nijn laarsje 
Dank U, Sijii A^ic'laasje / " 

This being translated is '' Sint Nicolaas Kapoentje " 
(the word has no special meaning in the context, but 
its value for rhyming purposes is evident), '' put some- 
thing in my shoes, put something in my boots : Thank 
you, Sint Nicolaas." And the saint always justifies 
the anticipation of his kind offices. 

The traditional Saint Nicolaas, adopted by parents 
and uncles and elder brothers and sisters for agreeable 
deceptions, is an old man with a white beard, robed 
in a gown of red trimmed with ermine (recalling thv; 
Nicolaas with the furs of the German belief), staff in 
hand, mitre on head, and riding a white horse. He 
is attended by a black servant, the zzvarte knccJit (again 
recalling, perhaps, the Knecht Rupert of Germany), 
who carries a bag full of presents and another con- 
cealing a rod ; for the benevolent saint is supposed 
to chasten the naughty as well as to reward the well- 
behaved. Once a year, on this Fifth of December, 



m HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

he and his servant ride over the roofs to that end ; 
and so it happens that the children are directed .to 
place carrots and hay in the boots and shoes which 
they leave under the chimneys for their deserts before 
going to bed, — to propitiate the steed, if not the rider. 
And in the morning, of course, carrots and hay have 
disappeared. 

One of the special joys of Sint Nicolaas is the SiJit 
Nicolaas cake, the exact composition of which has not 
been discovered to me. It is displaying a sad ignorance 
of things gastronomic to describe it as gingerbread with- 
out the ginger; but that is the narrowest generalisation 
to which I can attain. A spiced cake it is at any rate, 
baked in manifold shapes, — of men and horses and 
houses and birds. The favourite fashion is an immense 
flat doll, in the dressing of which in gold and silver 
tinsel the confectioner takes infinite pains and pride, 
as Dr. Beets has described in a chapter of his '' Camera 
Obscura." By judicious art, sex is suggested in the 
clothing, so that there is no difficulty in following the 
ancient practice of presenting the maids and the men- 
servants, each after his kind, with sweethearts in this 
succulent stuff. I have been more fortunate in probing 
some of the other Sint Nicolaas mysteries. Borstplaat 
is simply the sugar-heart of everybody's childhood. 
Banket, on the other hand, is an almond pasty of 
fantastic shapes. 

Sint Nicolaas is the season of the year for the inter- 
change of gifts. Coleridge, writing of what he saw 
while travelling in North Germany, described a custom 



88 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

of present-giving there at Christmas in terms exactly 
appHcable to Sint Nicolaas in the Low Countries. 
The gifts are not costly, and derive much of their value 
and interest from the care spent in devising such as 
are curious, or specially suitable, or even pleasantly 
ridiculous. The great point is to keep their nature 
secret until the moment of presentation arrives. They 
must be surprises, and shopkeepers, we observe, keep 
in stock a supply of '' surprises " — often for the pur- 
chaser rather than for the ultimate recipient, — which 
probably is one of the first signs of the decay of the 
custom. For days and even for weeks previously each 
shaded corner in the house is held by some member 
of the family intent on the manufacture of these pres- 
ents. Every one knows that Sint Nicolaas surprises 
are in store; but that does not take away from the 
pleasure of giving or of receiving. Nor, apparently, 
does it lessen the mystery of the whole affair, which 
it is sought to heighten by the gifts being studiously 
anonymous. It is pretended at any rate that the mys- 
tery is increased thereby; as a matter of fact, few fail 
to guess the donor, and those who do fail are not 
allowed to remain in doubt long. We have seen a 
good-natured uncle sally forth with two boxes under 
his arm. Both were intended for the same destination; 
both reached it, but in a roundabout way. The old 
gentleman placed one on the doorstep of his nieces, 
rang the bell, and from a little distance watched his 
summons being answered and his parcel taken indoors. 
Then, in order that the children should not think that 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 89 

it came by the same hand as the first, he takes the air 
for a time before depositing the second box on the same 
spot, and watching its disappearance inside in tufSI^T" 
He did n't deceive the children, of course ; we wonder 
if really he deceived himself At any rate he dis- 
covered for us something of that childlike happy- 
heartedness which is so greatly in evidence in Holland 
on the Eve of Sint Nicolaas. 



VII 



Among this people of simple habits, — -precisely 
among that section of them in which true simplic- 
ity of habits is most conspicuous, — learning is culti- 
vated with the single-mindedness for which Holland 
has been renowned from a time earlier even than the 
confederacy of the Provinces. We must distinguish, 
however, between the learning of her scholars and the 
education of her people. There have been periods 
in the history of Holland, — the fourteenth century for 
example, — when the spread of education within her 
borders was her brightest distinction ; but the present 
is not one of them. In her national education she 
does not set a shining example now among the 
nations. Yet there is a sense in which it may be held 
that there is no country in the world to-day better 
educated. 

I have recorded my impression already that the 
Dutch peasants are not very well educated and not 



90 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

very well informed ; but it must be understood that I 
was comparing them, not so much with the peasantry 
of other countries, as with the other classes in their 
own. And when I said further that the peasant in 
Holland does not get the opportunities of improving 
himself that he seems well able to make good use of, 
I did not refer to opportunities of schooling, but rather 
to those of acquiring knowledge from association with 
men more widely read and more widely travelled than 
himself, from books and periodicals, and of assimilat- 
ing the graces and refinements of art and the instruc- 
tion of science, which are afforded only in social 
conditions more fluid than those of Holland. The 
opportunities of education are plentiful. It is one of 
the chief concerns of the Department for Home Affairs, 
and the Constitution commits it to the constant care 
of Government. There must be a school, or schools, 
in every commune, open to all without consideration 
of religion, and in these schools, according to the Act, 
the education is not to be limited to " the three R's," 
but is to embrace an improvement of heart and mind, 
so that, to use its own words, the people may be " edu- 
cated to all Christian and social virtues." I propose 
to outline in a later chapter the scheme of education 
in Holland, from which the reader will be able to judge 
how far, on paper at least, provision is made for attain- 
ing this high aim. One seldom hears the complaint, 
it ought to be said, that in practice the scheme fails 
owing to the manner in which it is carried out in the 
schools. Nor is the education placed beyond the 




On a Lonely Farm. 
From a painting by Albert Neuhuys. 



92 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

reach of any one. It is not free, but it is nearly so. 
The fees are not high. In Amsterdam, for example, 
a child can have a very excellent elementary education 
on payment of a fraction above one penny a week; 
for a fee of fourpence a week, he can have that in- 
struction with elementary French added. Even from 
these fees poor parents are exempt without any civil 
disabilities following the relief. The blot on the sys- 
tem is not that the schools are not brought to the 
children, but that the children are not brought to the 
schools. Education is not compulsory. 

It cannot be said that in consequence there is a 
great deal of illiteracy. You meet with a good many 
people who cannot read, but seldom among the young. 
Almost all conscripts, it is found, can sign their names 
at least. Nevertheless, although the number of chil- 
dren who receive no regular schooling is decreasing 
year by year, it still is, I believe, as high as sixty 
thousand, and there are in certain conditions of life in 
Holland serious obstacles in the way of its ever being 
brought very low. I may mention two. One is the 
isolation in which in some parts of the country many 
families live, — among the moors and fens in the east, 
for example, which have been described earlier. That, 
however, is comparatively an unimportant difficulty, 
and it is being removed as more and more of the fen- 
lands are being brought under cultivation. The other 
obstacle cannot be overcome so easily. It is the large 
number of children — I believe it is estimated at thirty 
thousand — who live on board ship. The waterways 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 93 

of Holland are crowded with small craft, here to-day 
and away to-morrow, never in any haven for long, but 
carrying merchandise between far-distant places inland ; 
and on these vessels whole families live from year's 
end to year's end. The boats are their only homes. 
There is nothing degrading in that condition of liv- 
ing. The vessels are scrupulously clean and neat, 
" painted like toys and with pots of flowers and 
cages of song birds in the cabin windows," like the 
Dutch ships of another class that made Dysart 
famous for Mr. R. L. Stevenson. I remember once 
watching some of these boats enter from the Lek at 
Vreeswijk. They had come from far away up the 
Rhine, and one would have thought that once they 
were again within a Dutch canal the family on board 
would feel like sailors arrived in port. But no. River 
or canal was all the same to them. Where their 
boat was, there they were at home. The skippers 
were not yet done manoeuvring them into the locks 
when buckets were let down, and the women, without 
one curious glance at the people on the quay, were 
busy scrubbing and polishing as if they lived anchored 
for ever in a cottage in the polders. There is some- 
thing idyllic in the life on these canal boats as you 
can see it while they crawl from town to town : the lad 
on the bank, straining at the long rope from the mast- 
head himself, or urging the canal-horse to the same 
work; his elder brother laboriously punting, while a 
sail is rigged to catch any wind that may be going; 
the skipper hanging leisurely over the helm, or his wife 



94 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

or daughter taking his place while he sits " in slippers 
on the break of the poop, smoking the long German 
pipe ; " the stove in the cabin drawing comfortably, 




The Canal Horse, 
From a sketch by Jacob Maris. 



the dinner cooking, the children playing about round 
the cargo. I have heard ladies in Holland say that 
to live such a life on such a canal boat was the dream 
of their youth. Well, in this manner of life lies one of 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 95 

the chief difficulties in the way of national education in 
Holland. There is at the present moment a bill in the 
Dutch Chambers to make education compulsory, and it 
is not improbable that before this book is in the reader's 
hands, it will have become law. During a short 
visit I paid to Holland, I saw here and there great 
activity in the building and furnishing of schools ; than 
which there could be no better proof that a measure 
of compulsory education is expected, and that at 
the present moment there is not full provision for the 
instruction of all the children in the country were the 
opportunity claimed on their behalf But the difficul- 
ties in the way are so great that I should think it 
extremely unlikely that a compulsory Act would be 
rigidly enforced for many years to come. 

The place of religion in the national education is 
a question with bearings far wider than that of com- 
pulsion. Religion in Holland, as we shall see later, is 
free. No man suffers any legal disabilities on account 
of his creed. Speaking very generally, there are two 
Protestants for every Roman Catholic, and the Jews, 
of whom there are some 90,000, or rather more than 
there are in London, are in the proportion of one in 
sixty of the population. The divisions among the 
Protestants again are numerous. But although, in 
accordance with its tolerant traditions, the State pro- 
vides an education that is severely neutral in regard 
to religion and politics, and the teachers in Dutch 
public schools are sorely puzzled to teach — Dutch 



96 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

history, say — without seeming to give their instruc- 
tion a rehgious or poHtical colour, the parents in 
increasing numbers are seeking a religious education 
for their children, and schools with the Bible and 
schools meeting more particular demands of creed 
are springing up on all sides. Indeed, ten years ago, 
the movement against the strict neutrality of the State 
schools was so strong, and was such a distracting 
element in the political situation and in the condition 
of political parties, that a compromise was arrived at 
whereby the State subsidises denominational schools. 

While, however, the denominational schools differ 
entirely from the State schools, inasmuch as the in- 
struction in them has a religious colour, they are under 
the same control; or at any rate every precaution is 
taken to keep them under it. The precautions do not 
apply only to denominational schools wdiich receive 
State support ; they extend to all private and adven- 
ture schools. No one is allowed to establish a school, 
no one is allowed to teach in a school, who is not able 
to satisfy and (which is more important) continue to 
satisfy, the appointed examiners as to his or her equip- 
ment and morals. You cannot open an adventure 
school in Holland unless you hold a Head Teacher's 
certificate. Those who had opened schools previously 
to 1878, had to study and to pass the new examina- 
tions demanded by the Education Act of that year. 
Teachers cannot be employed in adventure schools 
who have not passed the examinations demanded of 
teachers in the State schools. Neither in one school 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 97 

nor another are the unqualified allowed to teach. 
You may not teach any language unless you have 
passed a special examination in that language ; and 
this applies even to natives of the country in which 
the language is spoken. A strict guard is set thus 
upon inefficient teaching in private schools. Of neces- 
sity, however, the standard of teaching varies with the 
various schools, and no one will be surprised to hear 
of frequent complaints that in the denominational 
schools the level of efficiency reached is lower than 
in the State schools. 

When he has passed through the elementary school, 
the Dutch boy finds the educational course branching 
in two paths in front of him. He is then twelve or 
thirteen, or he may even be a year older. The one 
path leads through the secondary schools — the tech- 
nical schools, or the high-burgher schools — to the 
industrial and commercial careers. By following the 
other through the gymnasium and the University he 
reaches in due course a learned profession. There is 
no need to examine here the nature and curricula of 
the secondary schools : they are shown in the chapter 
on education. I have not the knowledge necessary to 
speak of the results attained in them. On paper, the 
instruction at the high-burgher schools is excellent, 
and in Holland itself these schools have a very high 
repute. On paper, also, there is abundance of tech- 
nical education ; but what, it may be asked, is a 
technical school more or less in the face of workshop 

7 



98 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

results? From personal knowledge, I cannot speak 
of the workshop results; but any traveller in Holland 
to-day can observe signs of great industrial activity. 
Holland — or such is the impression I have received 
— has awakened out of a sleep. The new energy 
which has been noted in agriculture, is informing 
industry also. This spring, I was astonished to see 
factories and works of all kinds springing up all over 
the country, and especially in the east, where, noto- 
riously, there has been less enterprise hitherto, and 
less encouragement for enterprise, than in the west; 
and I have the impression, not uncorroborated by 
observant Dutchmen well-informed about their own 
country, that there is a marked revival and a step 
forward in manufactures and industries in all branches. 
I am far from attributing this to any system of educa- 
tion ; but it certainly can be said that, whatsoever its 
cause, whether it be due to some awakening within or 
to pressure without, it is a happy coincidence that the 
technical training is at hand to aid it. As yet, how- 
ever, commerce has not got fashion on its side. For 
the supremacy of England in industry, an instinct of 
national character accounts greatly ; but it is not a 
little due to the entrance upon the industrial career 
of much of the best blood as well as the best brain 
and education among her people. England owes 
her empire abroad largely to her splendid dare-devils, 
and it is their brothers at home who have set her in 
the forefront in more peaceful and orderly enter- 
prises : the same blood, the same genius in both. 




v^'Ne>^ 



A Marken Boy. 
From a drawing by W. Rainey. 



lOO HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

Now of Holland that cannot be said. There is indeed 
a daring practical talent among the Dutch, and it is 
often found applying itself to commerce ; but in very 
many cases, from choice but still more often because of 
a certain disdain of commerce, it is content to exer- 
cise itself so far as it can in more learned pursuits. 
The professions have gained enormously in conse- 
quence, but commerce, like agriculture, suffers from 
the lack of a nobler infusion. 

One must guard, indeed, against a too literal accept- 
ance of the impression that there is a firm line mark- 
ing off the classes that may be described generally as 
the professional and the commercial. Probably the 
Dutch themselves would hotly dispute that it exists 
at all. They would point to Amsterdam with her 
patrician merchants, more proud than any aristocracy 
of birth ; and to Rotterdam, a city of 275,000 inhabi- 
tants, wholly given up to commerce, and not to be dis- 
missed by a generalisation of this kind. How, in view 
of these, they would ask, can it be said that there is 
in Holland a disdain of trading? Cities and towns 
more typical than Amsterdam and Rotterdam would 
be made to furnish illustrious proofs that commerce 
does not lack an infusion of blood and of high edu- 
cation. It must be so. Everywhere throughout the 
country men of position and learning and taste are 
found engaging in commerce ; otherwise the Dutch 
would be an unnatural and monstrous people, pre- 
serving social . conditions that in all other countries 
have disappeared since feudal times. The whole his- 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY loi 

tory of Holland tells of a nation that has been estab- 
lished upon merchandise. The Dutch, two centuries 
ago, were the greatest traders the world has ever 
seen. As has been noted already, there runs through 
them still, from top to bottom, a certain practical 
quality that makes them commercial in spite of 
themselves. We might go further, and with a great 
deal of truth suggest that their defects are those of 
their trading qualities, and that instead of a lack 
of a nobler infusion in their commerce we ought to 
have discovered a lack of generous and prodigal 
instincts in the nation as a whole. All these con- 
siderations, however, do not alter the impression that 
there is this line between the commercial and the 
professional classes. It is not impassable. It does 
not show itself at every turn. Probably it is no more 
than one of the conditions of a crystallised society 
that would not seem unusual to any save English and 
American eyes. But whatsoever it is, it marks off 
spheres of influence. 

In Holland, people live in rings, and the system of 
education, and the fashion of education, it might be 
added, helps to preserve this concrete condition of 
society. While the secondary — the high-burgher 
and the technical — schools lead naturally to commer- 
cial careers, the gymnasia are the portals to the uni- 
versity. The boy is twelve or thirteen years old 
when he has to choose his path. It is, of course, 
quite possible for him to change his mind later. If 
he has gone through the course at the gymnasium, he 



102 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

is not badly equipped for commercial life. Besides 
Latin and Greek, he has had a practical training in 
the sciences. There is a strong feeling in Holland 
at present that at the gymnasia the sciences are 
receiving too much attention, and the classics too 
little. He has a command of several modern lan- 
guages. The national habits of mind and life are all 
in his favour. But it is different with the boy who, 
after passing through the high-burgher school, decides 
upon going on to the university. His education so 
far has not prepared him for his new studies. He has 
had neither Latin nor Greek : his training has been 
essentially practical. It is too late for him to turn 
back and enter the gymnasium. He can study pri- 
vately, but it will require several years of private 
study to put him on equal terms with a student who 
enters the university after six years of special train- 
ing in a gymnasium. The course in the high-burgher 
school is shorter than that in the gymnasium; still, he 
is handicapped by loss of time. The universities are 
open to all, it is true, and boys can pass to them 
directly from the high-burgher schools without study- 
ing privately. Many who intend to study Medicine 
do so ; but in the end they are more severely handi- 
capped than ever. For although they pass their 
professional examination, they do not receive their 
Doctor's degree, and they must go to a foreign 
university and win it there, if they are not to suffer 
from the want of the title. And they are punctilious 
in the matter of titles in Holland, The universities 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 103 

say to the boy, in effect: The way to us is through 
the gymnasia; choose it in time. And the result is 
that, in order to be in time, the boy's parents choose 
it for him. 

It would be wonderful indeed if such a system did 
not create, or preserve, a ring, — call it, a ring of the 
university-bred. In Holland this ring encircles very 
many. Often, one frequently hears, even parents who 
can ill afford the expense send sons to the universities, 
though in consequence they have to start their whole 
family upon the business of life crippled in fortune. 
We must recollect how small the private fortunes of 
the Dutch middle classes are, and how much they 
mean to the possessors. Certainly in Holland the 
number of men who get a university training seems 
very large. In comparison, no doubt, there are fewer 
than in Germany who hold a Doctor's degree ; as we 
have seen, obstacles are put in the way of a student 
coming up merely to take a degree in science. But 
the proportion of men who undergo long special aca- 
demic training, and attain to a high standard of general 
learning, is unusually large. I am not speaking with 
the authority of figures; but I do not think that any 
one who knows Holland can doubt that that impression 
is correct. 

The men practising in the learned professions, of 
course, are the nucleus of this body of educated 
opinion. Were it not that all their members appear to 
thrive, one would say that in Holland these professions 
are overcrowded : perhaps the small private fortunes 



104 HOLLAND AN^D THE HOLLANDERS 

cover a multitude of failures. One does venture to 
think, at any rate, that there are too many engaged in 
them for the good of the country. And if this is true 
of the professional men, it seems even more true of the 
civil officials, who swarm in larger numbers still. Quiet 
and douce men, without an ounce of swagger, the 
Dutch civil officials are the most effectively all-prevail- 
ing class on the face of the earth; and many of them 
are absorbed by this body of which I am speaking. 
So are many of the notaries, whose excellent services 
in the registration of contracts do not seem to diminish 
the ranks of practising lawyers. In addition, a large 
proportion of the leisured and titled classes take their 
degree: it is the fashion for them to do so; and com- 
merce has its share of those who receive the hig-her 
education. All these men, of considerable, often of 
great, attainments in learning, in virtue of that very 
fact exercise an influence in their country that to 
those accustomed to society in solution, as it is in 
England and America, appears quite extraordinary. 
And it is all the more marked because in Holland 
the military class has little influence, and men of birth, 
as such, have scarce any at all. 

Holland, in a word, is not so much a highly edu- 
cated country as it is a country of highly educated 
people. A sound and liberal education is brought 
within the reach of all and is accepted by nearly all ; 
but notwithstanding the high-falutin' of the Act, it 
can hardly be said to iiave greatly developed " all 
Christian and social vu-tues " in the mass of the 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 



105 



people. The Dutch field-worker is the servant of a 
bocr, and the Dutch boer is the Dutch boer, as we 
have seen: should education ever make him any- 
thing else, it is doubtful if it will leave him so p^ood a 




The Farm-Labourer. 
• From a drawing by Jozef Israels. 

peasant. The workmen .are less easily discovered. 
I speak with pleasure and gratitude of an hour I 
spent with one who gave me a most interesting ac- 
count of his town and its various industries. He wore 
wooden shoes, which he left dl^tside the house door, 



io6 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

and he entered the room on his stocking-soles, as any 
Dutch peasant would ; and he talked in English, and 
could have talked in French and German even more 
fluently. But my friend stands all by himself. Still, 
many workmen show great cleverness in picking up 
languages from foreigners working beside them in the 
shops : the gift of tongues has descended upon all 
Dutchmen; but in the gift of manners the gods have 
been more sparing. Comparing his own with British 
workmen, the Dutchman says, " Ours are not so 
beschaafd^' meaning " smoothed out," as a piece of 
wood is that has come under the plane. The smaller 
shop-keepers in the towns, again, exhibit the petty 
vices and vulgarities of small traders everywhere, and 
few of the ambitions of our own. The lower classes in 
Holland are friendly, as a rule, and civil ; but though 
education may have done much for them, it has left 
them wanting in savoir vivre. Dutch ladies and 
gentlemen never travel third-class, alleging that the 
conversation of the people makes their company im- 
possible. Well, the Dutch gentleman himself is a 
wonderfully frank person. Fashion, and not fear of 
the company, I suspect, drives them to this practice ; 
yet when such a custom prevails, the company could 
scarce be otherwise than as they allege. 

When we come higher, we certainly find a well edu- 
cated man. Evidently the higher secondary education 
is thorough. It makes for a very accurate knowledge, 
for a grasp and retention of fact ; and as it starts with 
a command of several languages its range is wide. 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 107 

Most people in the middle classes read French and 
German newspapers and books. Most know a little 
English, — far more than most English people know 
of French ; yet among the older people that knowledge 
must have been self-acquired, for in their youth Eng- 
lish was not generally taught in the schools. Medical 
students will acquire Italian in order to read the works 
of Italian physicians and surgeons. Ladies will learn 
Norwegian before visiting Norway. The education in 
the high-burgher schools, as we have seen, designedly 
avoids preparation for the university, but it affords a 
general culture as well as practical instruction. The 
best proof of this, perhaps, is the high level of educa- 
tion among Dutch women. Few of them pursue their 
studies beyond the high-burgher schools, which do not 
provide instruction in Latin and Greek, and thus the 
number of them who seek the higher education is 
small. But in general knowledge and culture, and in 
the wide range of their interests, Dutch women are the 
equals of women anywhere. It would amaze the Eng- 
lishman and the American to find how well their liter- 
atures are known among men and women in Holland 
who have no claim to learning; and of course all 
things French and German have a still greater interest 
for the Dutch. And on the practical side, the sec- 
ondary education seems to give the all-round equip- 
ment that enables a man to turn from one business and 
to apply himself with success to another. Whatsoever 
the man in the street in Holland may lack, it is not a 
stock of sound knowledge. 



io8 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

In Holland, the day of the man in the street is not 
yet. Perhaps it is now on the way, and all these new 
activities are the signs of its coming ; and if so, it will 
find him approximating in many ways to the man 
whom he is to supersede. But the ruling power in 
Holland still, although its reign may be nearing an end, 
is that indefinable body that almost is entitled to be 
called an aristocracy of learning. It appears unques- 
tionable that it has imposed upon society its arbitrary 
standards ; it has representatives in every town and 
village in the country who could enforce therh. Just 
as it says that matters of law must be decided by men 
of law, and will have none of a jury system, so it says 
in effect that matters of taste must be decided by men 
of taste, — and it, of course, comprises the men of 
taste. Needless to say, it contains as many stupid 
men as any unlearned body, and is no more infallible 
in its taste than in its reading of evidence. But it 
does seem to have preserved Holland from a cheap 
culture and a cheap religion.^^ The sensational appeal 
to the emotions is made to it in vain, and it scornfully 
rejects all the arts of the charlatan. So long as its influ- 
ence survives, it will make it difficult for men of merely 
clever commercial talent to create a following in art or 
literature that will give to their successes the justifica- 
tion of a contemporary opinion. It is too proud for 
that. Whether, if there is to be a change in all this, 
the educational system is to be held responsible for 
it, or whether the system is old enough to be judged 
at all in its results as yet, is doubtful. It is certain, at 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 109 

any rate, that it can never be so old that it will be 
more than one of many determining influences upon 
that subtle thing, the national character. And it is 
character that counts. 



VIII 



It has always been the wonder of travellers in Hol- 
land that so many religious sects should exist in so 
small a country. To-day, there is no less reason for 
the same surprise. We can still say, as was said more 
than two hundred years ago, that " in Amsterdam 
almost all sects that are known among Christians have 
their public meeting-places, and some whose names 
are almost worn out in all other parts." That is true 
of the whole of Holland in a slightly less degree only. 
The disruptions, of course, are always in the Protest- 
ant bodies, and one never hears of any reunions. Such 
sectarianism can be understood where Protestantism 
holds the whole field ; but in Holland the Protestants 
barely outnumber the Roman Catholics by two to one 
(a small majority with which to oppose the compact 
authority of the Church), and they have not always 
been so strong. Yet, with every reason to fight 
shoulder to shoulder, they are ranged in many con- 
flicting camps, and bitter as is their antagonism to 
Rome, their differences among themselves are so 
much more bitter that at recent general elections 
some of them crossed over and fought side by side 



no HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

with the Catholics on poHtical questions that in a man- 
ner involve religious freedom. Therein, some may 
say, is the strongest proof that, as Sir William Temple 
found, all the violence and sharpness, which accom- 
panies the differences of religions in other countries, 
is appeased and softened in Holland by the general 
freedom which all men enjoy. I do not think that all 
the violence and sharpness is ever quite appeased, 
either between Roman Catholics and Protestants, or 
between the various shades of Protestantism, and no 
one could call it even softened who watched its exhibi- 
tions during the elections referred to. It is quite true, 
however, that in Holland men enjoy a complete free- 
dom in their religion. So they have done, by allowance 
or connivance, for centuries. At least they leave each 
other alone. Whence, then, comes their tenacity in a 
creed, or in a ritual, or in the avoidance of one or 
other? The Remonstrants revolted against the Cal- 
vinists three hundred years ago, and they remain a 
separate body, numbering at the most fifteen thou- 
sand members. The old Lutherans came out from 
the Evangelical .Lutherans in 1791, and they keep 
out to-day, although they are only ten thousand 
strong. Were there ever more tenacious remnants? 
Yet it does not appear that all this strenuousness is 
informed by religious conviction. Religious Holland 
is a complicated problem. 

It will be well, in order to throw some light upon 
it, to say something of the various religious bodies 
of Holland to-day. Their origin and fortunes throw 



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112 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

vivid side-lights upon the national history. Two mil- 
lion and a quarter souls, fully half the population, are 
members of the Netherlands Reformed Church, the 
old, and now disestablished, State Church. It is high- 
Calvinist. The governing body in each congregation, 
the church-session we might say, is composed of the 
clergyman and the elders and deacons. In congrega- 
tions where there are more than three clergymen, 
clergymen and elders form, apart from the deacons, a 
body which attends to the spiritual interests of the con- 
gregation. Different groups of congregations within 
each province are ruled by " classes," — they might be 
called presbyteries, — consisting of the clergymen of 
all the congregations in the group, and an equivalent 
number of elders. From these ''classes" are sent up 
the members of the provincial synods, and each pro- 
vincial synod is represented in the general synod. 
Besides the eleven clergymen from the eleven prov- 
inces, there are in the general synod three professors 
sent by the Faculties of Theology in Leiden, Utrecht, 
and Groningen; a representative from the Walloon 
congregations ; three elders chosen in turn by the pro- 
vincial synods and the Walloon committee ; and a 
deputy representing the interests of the Church in the 
Indies, — nineteen members in all, with a moderator and 
a clerk, who meet at The Hague annually. The system 
of church government, it will be seen, does not cul- 
minate in a general assembly, as it does in Scotland, 
for example, but in a very select assembly. The 
Dutch are not great believers in the wisdom of num- 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 113 

bers. A committee, which sits twice a year, prepares 
the business for the meeting of the general synod. 
The financial affairs of the Church are under the con- 
trol of separate bodies : the guardians in each congre- 
gation, not elected directly by the members but by 
the " notables " who have been chosen by the members 
for this purpose ; the supervising committees in the 
provinces; and, since 1866, a general Committee of 
Supervision that meets at The Hague. The Walloons, 
who though a distinct body have an attachment with 
the Netherlands Reformed Church, are the descend- 
ants of the French Huguenots who fled to Holland 
after the Edict of Nantes was revoked. They have 
congregations in a few of the larger towns, and their 
services are still conducted in French. 

To follow the many secessions from the Mother 
Church is as difficult as to trace the various wanderings 
of the Rhine. The oldest, that of the Remonstrants, 
dates from as far back as the Peace of Twelve Years 
during the war with Spain, from the teaching of 
Arminius in Leiden, and the struggle between Maurits 
and Olden Barneveldt. It is, as it was always, the 
most liberal communion in Holland, and though prob- 
ably it numbers not more than fifteen thousand mem- 
bers, it certainly represents the religious thought and 
attitude of very many more. The Christian Reformed 
body, on the other hand, seceded in the first half of 
this century to maintain a stricter orthodoxy and a 
form of church government more in accordance with 
Scripture; and it succeeded so badly that within a 



114 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

year a section of it separated and formed the Christian- 
Reformed Church under the Cross. More recently, 
after a brisk but unsuccessful strategic movement 
under Dr. Kuiper, another party in the Netherlands 
Reformed Church was put out from her. This was 
the party of the Doleerenden. By-and-bye these joined 
with the Christian-Reformers as the Reformed Church 
in the Netherlands; but as was to be expected, some 
of both parties kept out of that union, and they con- 
tinue to exist separately under their old names. By 
this time, no doubt, the reader is completely satisfied 
that a spirit of sectarianism prevails among the Dutch 
Calvinists. 

There was no reason why Holland should be Cal- 
vinist rather than Lutheran except that the demo- 
cratic teaching of Calvin arrived in the provinces at 
the golden moment when they were throwing off the 
sovereignty of Philip of Spain. The Lutherans, conse- 
quently, have never been so strong in Holland, but 
that has not prevented disruptions among them. The 
original body, the Evangelical Lutherans, numbers at 
present sixty thousand, more or less; while the Re- 
formed Lutherans, who came into existence during the 
civil war at the end of last century through a secession 
of an Orange and more orthodox party in the Evan- 
gelical church at Amsterdam, are found almost en- 
tirely in North-Holland, and number about ten thousand. 
The Baptists again are fifty thousand strong. They 
approach very near to the Calvinists ; but retain adult 
baptism, — by sprinkling, not by immersion, — and 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 115 

they do not take an oath. The General Baptist Society 
at Amsterdam is the only central governing body that 
they possess. There are congregations of the English 
Episcopal Church at Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The 
Hague, and Utrecht; of English Presbyterians at 
Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Middelburg, and Flushing; 
of the German Evangelical Church at The Hague 
and Rotterdam. The Evangelical Brotherhood of 
the Herrnhutters, the Moravians, have churches at 
Zeist and at Haarlem; and there is a Catholic Apos- 
tolic Church at The Hague, and a Scots Church at 
Rotterdam. 

The Roman Catholic communion in Holland forms 
one ecclesiastical province, and is divided into five 
dioceses. These are the Archbishopric of Utrecht, and 
the suffragan Bishoprics of Haarlem, 's Hertogenbosch, 
Breda, and Roermond. The dioceses are subdivided 
into sixty-four deaneries. The clergy number about 
twenty-two hundred, and minister to a million and a 
quarter souls. There are also some six thousand Jan- 
senists, under Archbishoprics at Utrecht, Haarlem, 
and Deventer. 

The great influx of the Portuguese Jews into Holland 
was in the end of the sixteenth century; that of the 
German Jews in the beginning of the seventeenth. 
Together, they number to-day nearly ninety thousand, 
of whom the half live in Amsterdam. The Nether- 
lands Israelite Church has twelve head-synagogues^ 
seventy-four ring-synagogues, and seventy-four asso- 
ciated churches. The Portuguese Jews, an able and 



ii6 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

superior body, have head-synagogues at Amsterdam 
and The Hague, and one ring-synagogue. 

All these churches are upon an equal footing. There 
is no State church. It has not always been so, how- 
ever. When in 1579 the Seven Provinces united, each 
of them was left free to order religion within itself as 
it thought best; but very soon, from, a variety of 
causes, the Evangelical religion was imposed upon 
them, and at the Synod of Dort Calvinism was formally 
adopted as the national creed. There was freedom of 
religion for all men : even Roman Catholics, indirectly 
though not directly, were protected ; but the offices of 
State could be held by adherents of the National 
Church only. So it continued until the fall of the Re- 
public, with the fortunes of which, and of the House of 
Orange, the Netherlands Reformed Church had been so 
closely associated. Separation of Church and State was 
explicitly recognised by the revised Constitution of 1 848. 
The sovereign ceased to approve the orders of the 
Church, and to nominate the Moderator and Clerk of 
the General Synod, and at its meetings he was no 
longer represented by a Commissioner. In regard to 
finances, however, there was still a connection between 
the Church and the State, as there is to-day. In 1798, 
the possessions of the Roman Catholic Church, which 
had passed into the hands of the Reformers, were 
secularised, and the State undertook to pay the salaries 
of the clergymen of the established church for a 
certain period, after which the church was to be left to 
herself. Another system was adopted by the Consti- 




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Ii8 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

tution of 1815. Salaries and pensions, not of the 
Netherlands Reformed Church only, but of the Roman 
Catholics and of all Christian sects, were paid by the 
State ; and, save in the case of certain churches and 
congregations- that refuse it, — the Baptists, for ex- 
ample, only accept it when they are too poor to pay 
their minister, and that is seldom, — that payment is 
continued. But the Christian-Reformed Church, and 
bodies that have come into existence since 18 15, have 
no claim upon State aid. 

The State, of course, retains a supervision of all 
churches in the interests of public order. The only 
limits it sets to freedom in religion is interference with 
other people's freedom. Ecclesiastical bodies are in- 
sured liberty in regard to things concerning religion 
and its practice within their own folds ; but the orders 
of their institution and administration must be com- 
municated to Government. Without the sovereign's 
consent, a foreigner may not hold office in a church. 
Ecclesiastical officials, again, are not permitted to wear 
their robes of office outside the church buildings or 
enclosed places, save at those ceremonials, such as 
Roman Catholic processions, which were allowed pre- 
viously to 1848. The State carefully seeks to preserve 
from offence the feelings of any religious body, and 
so shrewdly has it anticipated possible causes of offence 
that it controls the tolling of church bells, — a matter 
out of which actions-at-law have arisen before now in 
other Calvinistic countries. 

In Holland people shatter the peace of communions 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 119 

over a fine point of ritual. They cling tenaciously to 
some rag of doctrine. Considerations of religion com- 
plicate their most beautiful schemes of government 
and education. And withal, it does not appear that 
religion is a very active, living, individual force in the 
country. It may be that many, by a reading of their 
history, have come to look upon religious conviction 
as something incidental only to political freedom. So 
it was to some extent in the great Spanish war which 
made Holland a nation. Ever since then, religion has 
been constantly used as a political weapon, and that 
may have debased it in many eyes. Religious cries 
have been raised unfailingly in the fight that has 
lasted between the two great political parties from the 
days of the House of Hainault's rule down to modern 
times. At the present moment liberal Dutchmen 
speak bitterly of a Pope enthroned in the midst of 
Dutch Calvinism, who is fighting unscrupulously in 
alliance with the Pope at Rome against their political 
liberties. Religious conviction may have been sapped 
of its strength in those tenacious endeavours to defend 
a creed. The strenuous differences of dissent, per- 
haps, have disgusted learned and cultivated men, to 
whom, in their pride of knowledge, the faiths of the 
people naturally seem foolishness. Republican Hol- 
land has always had an instinct for a ruler, and 
tolerant Holland, perhaps, has suff'ered from the want 
of authority. Account for it as we may, there is not 
that fire of spiritual conviction which we should ex- 
pect from so much smoke of religious controversy. 



I20 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

I am speaking of the Protestants, of course. The 
Church of Rome always commands the allegiance 
of her people, and nowhere more exactingly than in 
Holland, whose toleration is a subversive example to 
her people. Among the Protestants, the strength of 
the Netherlands Reformed Church lies in the ex- 
tremes of society, the higher classes and the peasantry, 
and therefore in the country rather than in the towns. 
The Court is strict in its orthodoxy and constant in 
its attendance at the services of the Reformed Church. 
So are the landed gentry, from the conservative in- 
stinct of their class of course, but also, in some cases 
at least, from a personal leaning, or fashion, towards 
evangelicism. Among them, probably more than 
among any of the other educated classes in Holland, 
do we find people concerning themselves in all that is 
known by " religious work." As for the peasantry, 
they too are orthodox, and they are religious on 
Sunday. A very deep and genuine piety, it is always 
said, exists among the fisher people. In political 
questions that involve considerations of religion, — 
that is to say, in all political questions almost, — the 
peasantry in many parts of the country are liberal; 
but all resent innovation in the church services. Men 
still stand to pray and sit to praise; the women sit 
throughout; neither man nor woman kneels. To 
stand in praise is a change which many clergymen 
would like to see introduced ; but some of them have 
assured me that they would fear to propose it. Some- 
times they will request their congregations to stand in 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 121 

singing a special psalm ; but they do not always get 
them to adopt the suggestion, and the innovation 
must not be repeated too often. We need not be 
surprised. Precisely the same persistence in the 
same stupid way, by better educated men, has rent 
congregations in our own country. 

In the middle classes, between these extremes of 
society, religion does not appear to have nearly so 
firm a hold. As might be expected, especially in that 
educated class that has been referred to already as 
exercising so peculiar an influence in Holland there 
is a strong body of liberal opinion and thought that 
practically, though not nominally perhaps, is dis- 
associated from any religious communion. A large 
section of the people in the towns — of the men, 
perhaps we ought to say: the assumption is evident 
that religion is a thing for women especially — do 
not attend church, or attend only at one or two set 
seasons. To be a member of a church, and even to 
be strongly attached to a particular body, does not 
seem to impose upon either man or woman the duty 
of church attendance. The country churches, it must 
be said, are generally well filled at the forenoon 
service; but I have been in the Old Church and 
the New Church in Amsterdam at the beginning of 
morning service, and found only a handful of people 
assembled. But for the children of the orphanages, 
there would not have been twenty worshippers. It 
seemed to me that, in the English Presbyterian 
Church close by, there were more Dutchmen — pre- 



122 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

sumably desirous of perfecting their English ~ than 
there were in the Old Church of the city. Yet in 
Amsterdam there are probably as many religious 
bodies as in any town in Christendom. 

It would be wrong to present this impression to the 
reader, and not to set beside it another, — of the culti- 
vated and conscientious and well-disciplined lives led 
by the educated middle classes of Holland. Possibly 
mistaking the form for the spirit, I may have exagger- 
ated the extent of the indifference to religion among 
them. Certainly, they do not make broad their phy- 
lacteries. Their fault rather is to be scornful of those 
who would wear phylacteries. They are not given to 
making prayers, either long or short. But they do 
set the example of the good life. I am not speaking 
of the accidental moralities, but of the essential virtues 
of endurance and honesty and justice. You would 
not dream of associating with them high thinking and 
laborious days. Their interests are frankly practical. 
They concern themselves, not with the things unseen, 
but with the ordering of the things that are seen; and 
they order them diligently and well, and at the same 
time comfortably. They are bound in custom, but 
singularly free from cant. They are scornful of the 
religious quack, and often they do not distinguish 
between the quack and one who is only over-con- 
scious of religious zeal. There is a pride of knowledge 
and there is a pride of faith. Fads and excesses get 
no encouragement from them. It has often seemed 
to me that in that cold atmosphere many aspirations 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 123 

are checked, and many delicate and pious souls 
starved. With the knowledge of men of the world, 
they are content to shut their eyes, but when they 
open them, they see wholly. They tolerate public 
lotteries, but it is very certain that, if they did enter 
upon a crusade against gambling, they would not 
stay to argue whether a betting man's stool in a 
paddock is a place, when they knew of a place, 
without doubt, at their own doors, where gamblers 
in stocks were subverting their country's honour and 
justice. 

Let us complete these impressions of the religious 
life of Holland b}^ attending morning service in a 
country church. A solemn Protestant bell rings us to 
worship. The boers stroll to the kirk, ** perplex'd wi' 
leisure," like Mr. Stevenson's Lothian ploughman, and 
they gossip at the door until the last stroke of the bell. 
Inside, the building smells familiar. I suppose it is 
that it smells orthodox. Three miles away from this 
village is another, wholly Catholic. Here, however, 
every one, from the burgomaster to Willem, the coach- 
man's boy, is severely Protestant, — in varying degrees, 
of course. There is another and a stricter sect gather- 
ing itself together somewhere within sound of our dol- 
orous psalm singing, the more worthily to defend the 
faith. So I am told; but I can scarcely believe it. 
This Netherlands Reformed Church is strict enough in 
all conscience, and these hard-featured, clean-shaven 
men, erect in prayer in front of their seats, with their 



124 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

peaked caps before their eyes, seem veritable stalwarts. 
You perceive in their attitude a rational consciousness 
of duty, nurtured on the Shorter Catechism or the 
like. In appearance the men are more reverent than 
the women, who sit down-stairs (with little stools for 
their feet, stoofjes, containing peat fire in winter, which 
is well, for the sermon is not shorter then than in 
summer), and are, all save the few in native costume, 
sadly over-dressed. The men-folk may sit beside them 
if they care, and some of them do ; as a rule, however, 
they abide by the old order which keeps the sexes 
apart. So they crowd the gallery, pausing, ere they 
seat themselves, in that stern attitude of prayer. 
Meanwhile, the precentor — there is an organ now, 
but previously the precentor gave the tune, hence his 
title of voorsanger — reads a portion of Scripture and 
the Ten Commandments; and then the minister 
enters, and with him the gentle-folks of the country- 
side. 

But listen ! The minister is giving out a psalm. 
Surely, despite the unfamiliar tongue, we are worship- 
ping with the Auld Lichts. In which body else would 
they sit to sing this laborious measure? In which, 
bear with a discourse so long that it must be relieved 
with a hymn as intermezzo? The sand-glass, cased in 
brass, still stands at the minister's right hand, but it 
does not work. Perhaps it has become sulky at being 
ignored, even as the staves of the collection-bags seem 
to have been made supple by consequential usage. 
De bitterheid van den dood is voorbij gegaan, *' The bit- 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 125 

terness of death is past," says the minister, giving 
out his text; and immediately a chubby deacon from 
the pew beneath unhooks the velvet ladle from the 
wall, and sets out on behalf of the poor upon a mis- 
sionary journey among the pews. He works the long 
handle for all the world like a hay-fork, now pitching 
it to the uttermost corner; now whipping it elegantly, 
yet dangerously near Mijntje's new bonnet, across a 
passage ; now manoeuvring it and himself dexterously 
round an awkward bend. And ere he has got half-way 
to the gallery, and while the preacher still fondles his 
first " head," another deacon, chubbier than the first, 
arises, unhooks another ladle on the minister's other 
hand, and braces himself to circumnavigate the pews. 
His is the appeal for the expenses of the kirk. Thus 
is the natural order reversed, and necessity follows on 
the heels of charity, — and closely. Do what I will, I 
cannot rid my mind of the idea that these two plump 
deacons are running a handicap race ! If they are, 
the result is a dead-heat. They pass the winning post 
of the pew of the elders together, winded, and perspir- 
ing, as the fifth sub-division of the third " head " is 
reached. If we have sinned in looking upon all this 
as a diversion, we do penance in what of the sermon 
still follows. Never was anything more dreary, and 
never did congregation disperse more rapidly, or with 
such evident relief, upon a benediction. You must 
stand to that, with your hat in your hand, and it is the 
depth of bad manners to resume your seat. So out 
we go, helter skelter, into the dusty highw^ay, to return 



126 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

no more for one week at any rate. There is no after- 
noon or evening service this Sunday. See these grave 
church-goers two hours hence, making hoHday in some 
inn-garden, and the resemblance between the Scots 
and the Dutch Sunday seems to have vanished. The 
resemblance is there, nevertheless, and the difference 
is slight in reality. They come a little more quickly 
back to the world here ; that is all. 



IX 



If I were to be asked what I consider the most 
typical thing in Holland, I should reply, " The family 
tea-drinking in the evening after dinner." When the 
Dutch Indian civil servant, in Celebes, it may be, 
shuts his eyes and allows Memory to cast home-pic- 
tures on the darkened lids, the most affecting, I think, 
must be that of the corner of the verandah all aglow 
at the tea-drinking hour, where the mother sits amidst 
the paraphernalia of her laborious housewifery, — the 
blue Delft, the spoons carefully resting in their case, 
the trim spirit-lamp, the singing kettle in the " tea- 
stove," the bowl for hot water, in which later on she 
will wash the cups and saucers with her own hand, — 
while the family are grouped around her, simmering 
tranquilly like the urn, speaking of the exile with dim 
eyes, but drinking an excellent brand. I do not know 
that anything could be in greater contrast to our 
usual conception of the Dutchman, — ** manlike, but 




A Man of Long Views. 
From a drawing by Jozef Israels, 



128 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

withal very harsh, as one ready at every word to pick 
a quarrel," Camden described him, putting the gen- 
eral sense into few words. Yet, probably, in this 
domestic retreat better than anywhere else, we can 
run to earth the true character of the Dutch which 
has been our pursuit in all these pages. 

The Dutch : not all Dutch people in Holland. A 
distinction must be made here that governs all these 
impressions. The majority have the easily recognised 
characteristics which we associate with their nation. 
They are, if I may use a Scots word to describe them, 
" kenspeckle." There are a minority, however, espe- 
cially in the upper classes in cities like The Hague 
and Arnhem, who have been pressed into a less na- 
tional mould. This does not necessarily make them 
less proud of the traditions and qualities of their 
people ; but with some there is an affectation of 
superiority, which is carried beyond the point of the 
ridiculous, and almost to that of the unpatriotic. 
There are households in Holland, I am told, in 
which you will scarce ever hear a word of Dutch 
spoken. A foreign language is used in the conver- 
sations at social gatherings, — at afternoon tea (itself 
an imported custom) and at the dinner-table, — and 
even in the talk of the nursery. For a time French 
was the choice of this fashion, but, recently, English 
has taken its place. 

I once witnessed an amusing incident which show^ed 
that this was resented by the people. In one of the 
steam-trams that ply between Arnhem and De Grebbe 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 129 

was a little party of ladies, English and Dutch. The 
English ladies spoke excellent Dutch, — so excellent, 
indeed, that the folks in the tram did not detect the 
accent of the foreigner in the few sentences they had 
occasion to utter in that language. Evidently they be- 
lieved them to be their own countrywomen, and when, 
a little later, the talk fell into English, and the Dutch 
ladies of the party joined in it volubly, they jumped 
to the conclusion that here was this unpatriotic pre- 
ference for a foreign tongue. And then follow^ed a 
scene which greatly tickled the fancy of the English 
travellers. In very forcible Dutch, remarks of ex- 
ceeding bluntness were passed up and down the car 
about the absurdity of pretending to be other than 
you are. '* It was a ridiculous thing (was it not?) that 
Dutchwomen should attempt to pass as foreigners, — 
especially as English. If they must be ashamed of 
their own language, now, they might adopt French. 
That, at least, was melodious. But English ! " And 
so on. The amusing thing was that the Dutch ladies 
at whom these asides were levelled were good patriotic 
Dutchwomen, with a strong grudge of their own against 
the inroads of English speech and fashion; and tlieir 
wrath at these unjustified innuendoes was not hid, and 
was amazing to behold. 

It is the typical Dutchman, then, that we are in 
search of; and he also, let it be said, is cosmopolitan. 
He is so, of necessity. It is given to few to have the 
capacity, to fewer still the will, to navigate headlands 
of aspirates and to weather torrents of gutterals, and 

9 



I30 HOLLAND AND TFIE HOLLANDERS 

to reach the haven of the Dutchman's understanding 
in his own tongue. The Dutch are polyglot for very 
life. Their necessity has compelled the gift of tongues. 
The tea-drinking hour that I have described is a time 
for quiet reading and conversation. The portfolio of 
the circulating library that is being handed round 
holds books and magazines and papers in many lan- 
guages. The whole family can read them, the whole 
family has been trained in Universal History, as it is 
called, and conversation leaps from one event of in- 
terest to another in every part of the globe. The 
serious business of life is over for the day, — with the 
men, at least; Dutch housewifery is never-ending, — 
and to turn from Holland to compare it with the rest 
of the world is a relaxation. For, notwithstanding 
their cosmopolitanism in speech and interests, the 
Dutch are insular. That is only natural. Holland is 
a small island, or a small congeries of islands, to the 
area of which the Dutch are constantly adding, and 
as surely as they are enlarging it, it recedes from 
the sphere of world influence. Yet they are con- 
stant in the recollection of the promise of earlier 
history, and of the performance also ; while by the 
rest of the world it is forgotten, they never cease to 
remember that once theirs was the country round 
which the destinies of all the nations revolved. 

The Dutchman is rebellious in heart, as well he 
may be, against the fate that has lost him his place 
among the Great Powers. He is conscious of the 
possession of ruling qualities. With physical habits 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 131 

so orderly that all the world thinks and talks of him 
as phlegmatic, he is watchful and courageous, endur- 
ing of purpose, a man of long views. The land he 
lives in is at once the proof of that, and the explana- 
tion. To make it and to keep it, and to make it worth 
the keeping, he has had that long fight with the waters, 
in which, after victories and defeats, and loss and 
reconquest of territories, he has won at last, and yet 
has won so barely that he dare not for a moment relax 
his vigilance against the fresh surprises of his enemy. 
How enduring and daring that fight had made the 
Dutch was shown in their other struggle with Spain, 
— a handful of cities against the mightiest Power on 
the earth, — carried on for eighty years in spite of 
defeats and difficulties, and atrocious cruelties that 
might have broken the bravest and most tenacious 
spirit; carried on to a successful close through three 
generations, when in the course of nature that spirit 
might have flagged and died of itself. Conceive if we 
can — yet for us who live in these shrieking days it 
is well-nigh impossible — a people, under the strain 
of that struggle for a period as long as from Waterloo 
to now, not only achieving marvellous triumphs in 
drainage and land reclamation, educating themselves, 
producing the foremost scholars in Europe, and a 
body of almost unparalleled painters, but also welding 
themselves into the greatest commercial and colonis- 
ing Power then existing in the world, and we have 
some idea of the endurance and the long views of the 
Dutch three centuries ago. 



132 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

The nation was too young, too ill-trained, and too 
ill-developed as yet in its constitution, for such a 
struggle, and it was overstrained. At that moment, 
there came into the field another rival, England, of 
more mature stamina and more trained vigour, and 
for Holland the race was lost. But to the people of 
Holland the war with Spain brought new qualities of 
greatness, to add to those bred in them, and still put 
to the test in them, by the fight with the waters. It 
crystallised in them a hatred of oppression in any form. 
The roots of that hatred may lie in the Frisian race, 
which in a sense is the core of the Dutch nation. The 
reader has been warned already against accepting the 
popular conception that Friesland is superior to the 
rest of Holland to-day, and against finding corrobora- 
tion of that idea in recent disturbances in Friesland, 
which only prove that there is a rather troublesome 
people there. But while it is impossible in Holland 
to-day to distinguish the races that compose her, the 
special qualities of these races shine out in the nation 
as a whole, and not least of all those of the Free 
Fries. A hatred of tyranny, at any rate, was dis- 
played in the war with Spain, and the struggle en- 
shrined it in the national character. To-day it has 
little cause to show itself, for all those liberties which 
peoples, as opposed to individuals, can fight for, Hol- 
land possesses. She is as free as any nation in the 
world. There is not a single liberty she could gain 
by becoming a Republic again. I have seen the 
impatience of the Dutch with all policing — the Trie- 




A Peasant Bqy. 
From a drawing by Jozef Israels. 



134 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

tion between the people and the poUce of Amsterdam, 
for example — spoken of as showing that they are 
still possessed of the old spirit of freedom; but that 
is a poor compliment to pay both them and it. No 
one will hold them up as pre-eminent in the ordering 
of themselves, — though in this respect they are well 
enough. The supreme sense of self-order in a people 
involves compromise, and compromise is alien to the 
Dutch character. It is opposed to a quality that the 
Dutch have in excess : they are almost immoderate 
sticklers for their rights. I am speaking of them 
individually as well as in the mass. It is a disagree- 
able quality, and earns for the Dutchman the reputa- 
tion of being hard and ungracious, whereas in reality 
he is one of the most obliging, and often one of the 
most generous, of men. But it carries with it the rare 
and splendid quality of justice. The Dutchman will 
have his rights ; but asks no more. He is infinitely 
just. It is his most outshining attribute. The sense 
of justice is one of his only passions. There is no 
impression of the Dutch borne in upon me more 
strongly than that. It has been produced by a hun- 
dred experiences, and especially by one this spring. 
I had the opportunity then of conversing with Dutch- 
men of all classes, in all parts of the country, and I 
found nearest the heart of all of them, — workingmen 
in Twente, packmen in Brabant, farmers in the fen- 
colonies and in the polders, fishermen on the Maas, 
merchants, lawyers, shop-keepers, clergymen, men and 
women of all sorts and conditions, — an amazing indig- 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 135 

nation over the Zola trial. It was something quite 
different from the feeling the case aroused in our own 
country; it was so fierce and widespread, and it was 
so enduring, for at the time of which I speak, the trial 
was long past, and had ceased to be talked of in Eng- 
land. It is true that many Dutchmen had read of it 
in the French newspapers, and so received a more 
intimate impression of it; but, in reality, their indig- 
nation was little affected by their belief in the guilt or 
innocence of Dreyfus, or by their opinion of M. Zola's 
wisdom. It simply blazed out at what they considered 
so flagrant a travesty of justice. The experience was 
a revelation. 

His constant fight with the insensible elements has 
taught the Dutchman to discern the hard facts under- 
lying the appearances of things. Howsoever he may 
be startled into an enthusiasm, a cool calculation suc- 
ceeds to it, and he cuts clean through beauty in search 
of utility. He is not scJiwdrmerisch, like the German. 
A dispassionate reasoning directs his counsels and his 
actions to safe ends. He is inventive, and rich in con- 
trivances. His talent lies in his firm grasp of material 
realities. This practical sense is so exaggerated, in- 
deed, that in the conduct of affairs it often defeats 
itself, and since it suffers no illusions, he seldom feels 
the splendid glow, or attains the splendid results, of 
those who are inspired by passion to high endeavour. 

Yet withal that he is uncompromising and utilitarian, 
the Dutchman is a sentimentalist. Plain of speech, 
often brutally truthful, a sufferer of no illusions, he is 



136 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

childlike in his affections, and in his shows and cele- 
brations thereof. It is then that we catch a glimpse in 
him of those ancestors of his as shown to us in jovial 
scenes painted by Frans Hals and van der Heist. 
Sometimes when he is surprised out of his calm pro- 
priety he exhibits an extraordinary abandonment. 
That is not only true of the peasantry at the Kermis, 
but of the more refined classes. Every fifth year, each 
university in Holland celebrates its foundation by a 
week of feasting, — a mode characteristically Dutch ; 
and it was my good fortune once to follow the gaieties 
of one of these feast-weeks. It is a time for the meet- 
ing of old friends; and on the first night the members 
of each year's class, who have come from all parts of 
the country to attend the celebrations, dine together 
somewhere in the town, and afterwards march to- 
gether, headed by bands of music, to the pleasure- 
garden where the festivities are wound up each day. 
It is impossible to describe the hilarious excitement as 
these parties kept arriving, marching or, rather, leaping 
and dancing arm-in-arm, through the garden to the 
strains of lo Vivat ; and it reached a climax when the 
older members appeared, survivors of classes away 
back in the "forties" and "fifties," dancing and sing- 
ing with as great spirit as the youngest. The next day 
these elders at least had relapsed into their usual grave 
demeanour, not to be tempted from it until five years 
later, if they lived so long. No one who knows these 
Dutchmen would grudge them that hour of high jinks, 
or think the worse of them for it; but it may be 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 137 

doubted if there is another country in the world where 
professors and statesmen and lawyers and country- 
gentlemen would be found sufficiently ingenuous to 
present such an exhibition of abandon in public. The 
reader, remembering one of the failings of the Dutch- 
man, may say that Schnapps loosens the joints. But 
neither his frolicsomeness nor his sentimentality is 
merely imbibed. Both are as much part of his nature 
as his intellectual hardness. We might say of him as 
Mackellar said of the Master in Stevenson's novel, that 
he has an outer sensibility and an inner toughness. 
Yet he is at the other pole from Mr. Bally. 

The Dutch have an instinct for the precise and safe 
ordering of their lives, which is a direct outcome of the 
physiographical conditions in which they live. The 
trim and sober towns, the straight lines of the canals 
that enclose and drain the fields and the exactitude 
with which these must be kept at their proper level, 
and the abiding sense in the people that they live and 
work in dependence upon a mechanical precision in 
these things, — all this has its direct and natural influ- 
ence upon Dutch habits of life. A proof of this is that 
in the low-lying provinces an extreme and exaggerated 
orderliness of existence is most visible. Sir William 
Temple, with an eye upon the province of Holland 
mainly, noted particularly the disposition running 
through all degrees of men in it in his time to orderli- 
ness in their expenses. Not in that respect only, but 
in all the details of life, this precision is noticeable to- 
day. We have seen it in the furnishing and decoration 



138 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

of houses and in the laying-out of gardens. It is car- 
ried into the direction of home and of business. If 
you were permitted to penetrate to the mysteries of 
store-room and hnen-cupboard, you would often find 
method pushed to a deplorable extreme of mere 
mechanical arrangement. For all their contrivances 
to insure comfort, the Dutch fail to attain to ease in 
living. They add infinite friction to life in promoting 
a machinery for making it smooth. They are cum- 
brously comfortable and painfully at ease. As it is 
with the Dutch lady in her house, so is it with the 
Dutchman in his business. The rule of the neat, of 
the netjes, even governs the conduct of affairs.: this is 
shown by the love of the Dutch for elaborated schemes ; 
although here, no doubt, there is a trace of the system- 
atic methods imposed by the French upon their gov- 
ernment. Most of all, it is seen in the curious formahty 
that encases the hearty and simple social life of Hol- 
land. Through their liking for order in details, they 
submit themselves to the yoke of officialdom. You 
cannot travel a mile by train in Holland without learn- 
ing that man was made for the railways, and not the 
railways for man. Where the official ceases to prevail, 
Mrs. Grundy steps in with a hundred principles of con- 
duct not less imperious, to mould social intercourse 
upon the punctiliousness of the country town. All 
this, it is true, is changing. The hand of the official is 
lighter, and the rule of custom is being broken down, 
and seems likely, by the way, to be driven out before 
an army of cyclists. To dwell longer upon this double 




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I40 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

tyranny, and to cite, as one could, any of its ridicu- 
lous exhibitions, would be to leave a wrong impression 
of Holland of to-day. But in certain places, and in 
certain conditions of Society, of which Amsterdam 
perhaps affords the best examples, an extraordinary 
stiffness and formality is still associated with a simple 
habit of life. 

Life in Holland is simple, and it is safe. Extremely 
frugal the Dutch are not, although they are often re- 
presented as being so. They live comfortably and 
well. But the simple plainness of William of Orange's 
later life, which the historians have noted, is far more 
typical of the Dutch to-day than the splendid enter- 
tainments recorded of his youth ; and the magnificence 
of a Leicester would still cause a scandal. Even in the 
pomp and show of life there is an absence of competi- 
tion among them. As compared with many other 
countries, of course, the Dutch are not wealthy, al- 
though they are as far removed as any from being 
poor. Great fortunes are .made in business— in 
petroleum and tobacco, for example — and on the Ex- 
change ; but all over, wealth is more evenly distri- 
buted and incomes are smaller than in England. A 
millionaire among them is a man possessed of a mil- 
lion of guilders ; and he is rarely met with. Fortunes 
more moderate, but still large, are found in all classes. 
Sometimes their possessors are boers whom you can 
see in velvet slippers on a North-Holland causeway, 
or clanking about a hundred-acre farm in wooden 
shoes. They may have made their money, or they 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 141 

may have inherited it; but they remain steadfast in 
their class, and the sons and daughters they leave it to 
will be peasants, like themselves. Money circulates in 
Holland, but not the people. The law of inheritance 
in Holland, again, discourages the conservation of great 
fortunes and great estates. That is why, although 
there are large afforested tracts in the country, — in 
the East, to which the tourist seldom penetrates, — you 
nowhere find the wasteful splendour of old wood that 
can be seen in every county in England. It is in the 
middle classes, however, that the smallness of the in- 
comes is most noticeable, — or one should say, rather, 
is least noticeable. Not only comfort, but a certain 
grave and cultivated luxury also, appears to surround 
the lives of many households which — difficult as it is 
to believe It — are In receipt of an Income that would 
not be a laree waee for a London mechanic. In the 
professions, there are few plums, and the best of them 
are very small. Men of splendid talents, acknowl- 
edged to be at the top of the ladder In medicine and 
law, have to work hard to earn as much as a young 
buyer In the City. Holland possesses at present a 
band of enthusiastic and original writers, and now, as 
always, great painters : the most successful of the 
painters probably make a moderate competence, but 
It may be doubted If there is a man living in Holland 
to-day and writing In Dutch who can earn ;^i50 In a 
year by pure literature. Nor, as far as the necessities of 
life go, is it apparent that the cost of living In Holland 
is so much lower that It counterbalances the com- 



142 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

paratively small remuneration that men, in the middle 
classes at least, receive for their work. Outside of the 
very largest cities, workmen can live very well upon 
nine guilders a week. Families do live in the towns 
in more than comfort, as we have seen, on ^200 a year, 
and i^700 and i^iooo a year are very large incomes. 
There must be a difference in the cost of living, of 
course, but as I have said it does not lie in the neces- 
sities of life. Rents are not low, and while food, the 
produce of the country, is fairly cheap, clothes, which 
are mainly imported, are notoriously dear. 

All this seems a sufficient explanation of a simple 
habit among a people given to the well-ordering of 
their expenses ; but there is another cause for it, less 
accidental, and more influential on the individual and 
national character. A scarcity of money is not one of 
the impressions made upon the visitor in Holland to- 
day; but there are a hundred evidences that to live in 
security and safety, not only from the inroads of his 
constant enemy, the waters, but from changes of For- 
tune as well, has become a ruling instinct with the 
Dutch. It has always been said of them that they are 
avaricious. There is a quick expressive action with 
finger and thumb, and a talk of dubbelijes (the diibbeltje 
is a small silver coin worth twopence) in the conversa- 
tion of the lower classes, that seems to show how large 
a place money takes in their thoughts. But that which 
seems the vice of avarice is often in reality a virtuous 
abstinence from extravagance. It has been forgotten 
that the Dutch have good reason to set a high value 



jW3 i " ' ('»i- ' V"i"^ l i ! Wa ' Mi iw nx i'" - ' ; jffg * - ' • ' ' "p. '< •' ■••• f"' — ^■p;:? 
J. ' "? - "^ f '- "1 




In an Eastern Province, 
By Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch. 



144 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

upon money. There have been many periods in their 
history, when, under the reverses of war, compelled to 
pay enormous taxes, crippled in the colonial trade 
upon which their non-productive country so largely 
depends, and with all their resources sucked dry, they 
lived in great straits. There was such a period at the 
beginning of this century, when the Dutchman had 
even to forego his pipe ; and although the country 
quickly recovered from it, the effects of that pinch 
were still felt in their youth by the generation that is 
just passing away, and its influence upon their habits 
was great. Money does not lightly go in Holland, 
but neither does it lightly come. The instinct of the 
Dutchman to secure himself against the rainy day has 
been bred in him by necessity, and that it is not in- 
spired by avarice is sufficiently proved by his charities, 
which are not by any means limited to the splendid in- 
stitutions for which Holland is famous. 

Of all the qualities of the Dutchman which we have 
discovered, none seems to affect the social conditions 
and the national character so greatly as this instinct 
for securely entrenching himself in life against the 
assaults of Fortune. It affects them for bad even more 
than for good. In such an atmosphere as it creates, 
great enterprise does not flourish. I am not speaking 
of speculation, as gambling in stocks is called. There 
is plenty of that pestilent vice in Holland, as else- 
where. But the Dutch show little spirit in hazarding 
their fortunes in legitimate ventures. It has been said 
already that there are signs all over the country of in- 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 145 

creasing commercial and industrial activity, and I am 
informed that they are no less evident in the Indies ; 
but far too much of Holland's capital is tied up in 
foreign securities still, and far too little of it sunk in 
developing her resources at home and in her colonies. 
Save in one direction, that of adding to their country, 
the Dutch are not enterprising. They are ingenious, 
diligent, laborious even, but they lack expansive 
energy and ideas. While they have an extensive 
knowledge of all that is going on in the world, and 
watch it with their strong intelligence, their own in- 
terests are narrow. They are centred too wholly upon 
the home; one might say, I think, too wholly upon 
the house. We are brought back to the tea-drinking 
hour, when woman presides. I know that at the 
present moment there is a mild agitation in Holland 
on the subject of Woman's Rights, and that there is 
much that seems unjust in the legal position of the 
Dutchwoman ; and it is not without deliberation that I 
say that Holland appears to suffer from the excessive 
influence of women. It must not be supposed that 
they interfere in public affairs, or compete with men in 
their own field. Far from it. Her husband and chil- 
dren and house are the Dutchwoman's only concerns. 
To make the house comfortable for the husband is her 
chief end in life. And so eminently does she succeed 
that he is never happy out of it. Her affectionate care 
cajoles him from his ambitions. He has no sport, no 
golf let us say, to steel himself against the insidious 
softness. Woman's triumph is complete. Without 

19 



146 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

putting a foot in his realm, she entices him into hers; 
and though the law may call the husband head of the 
household, it cannot make any one save herself the head 
of the house. Thus everything confirms the Dutch- 
man in a safe and uneventful life. As with the individ- 
ual, so with the nation. Holland came out of her 
great war laden with spoils but shorn of strength. She 
can never recover her strength, and she retains the 
spoils only because she is protected by the public 
conscience of Europe. Of necessity her policy is 
negative and colourless. No one knows better than 
the Dutchman how futile are the cannon that stand 
pointed up the Rhine, The Dutch build a navy and pre- 
pare schemes of inundation, with little belief that they 
will ever be needed, and no belief at all that if they are 
needed they will avail. So Holland lives on, self- 
centred, entangling herself in no European questions, 
splendidly administering her colonies without osten- 
tation, allowing no dream of Empire, no intoxication 
of glorious memory, to tempt her into one moment's 
presumption in speech or action ; and prudence, her 
own supreme virtue, says that that way lies safety. 
Yet in her security lies her danger, so true is it of 
nations and of men that to save your life is to lose it. 
In the Dutchman all the plain elements of greatness, 
good and ill, lie awaiting some integrating force to 
make a man of him ; as it is, each pops up its head in 
him and proclaims him fifty men at once. And as the 
man lacks " devil," so the nation awaits an inspiration. 
Yet for Holland, it would almost seem, there can be no 



HOLLAND OF TO-DAY 



147 



inspiration save that of danger from without. She can 
never be inflamed by Imperial sentiment, or claim of 
prestige, or even by lust of power. Fate has willed it 
that in all the elements of offence she is impotent. 
But in the uses of defence she has been splendidly 
disciplined ; and it is possible to foresee contingencies 
when she would find that the conscience of Europe was 
a feeble reed to trust to, and her character might 
flower again in the sacrifice of a hopeless vindication 
of her liberties. That is not an impossible destiny. 
For when we see, as I think it is easy to see, in the 
less heroic sides of it, a continuity and unbroken 
development in the national character, we are justified 
in believing that there lie in it still, ready to be quick- 
ened by a national danger, the strong and enduring 
qualities that leaped forth to great ends in her golden 




Dogs in Cart. 
From a drawing by Charles Rochussen. 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 

IN the foregoing Impressions, nothing has been said 
of two things which always, more than any others, 
more even than the fight with the waters, although 
they are really less important than it, have interested 
travellers in Holland, — her pictures and her system 
of government. The marvellous body of painting by 
the old Dutch masters was one of the manifestations 
of the outburst of energy in Holland in the sixteenth 
and the seventeenth centuries when, it almost seems, 
all her powers burned up in one bright fierce flame. 
So much we can say; but that does not make its 
appearance in that time and in that place the less 
inexplicable. It is easy to find analogies between 
Dutch art and the conditions and character of the 
nation which produced it: to note in both, for example, 
a firm grasp upon the things of earth, a burgher quality, 
an absence of aristocratic tendencies. How easily, 
and how falsely at the same time, analogies are drawn, 
is shown by the discovery of many critics that the 
colour-sense of the Dutch comes to them, somehow 
or other, through contrast with the gloomy and dull 
country in which they dwell ; whereas it might be 
thought that every traveller in Holland knows that 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 149 

the note of Dutch landscape is a bright and luminous 
gleam of silver and emerald. It is difficult, at any 
rate, to correlate the work of the Dutch painters with 
Holland of to-day, and it has seemed to me best to 
consider it as an accidental interest, and to speak of 
the pictures only as we may happen upon them in the 
cities and towns that we shall visit later. With the 
system of government, of course, it is quite otherwise. 
It is a living and influential thing, with its roots in the 
past of Holland, and still shooting and developing; 
howsoever many exotic growths have been grafted 
upon it, it is a product of Holland, and intimately 
related with the life and character of her people. No 
excuse need be ofl"ered, therefore, for treating of it in 
a separate chapter. To do so fully, indeed, would 
involve the whole history of Holland, and is a work 
for the historian with many volumes at his command ; 
but it may be possible in a few pages to give the 
reader an idea of the system of government to be 
found in Holland to-day, and, in some measure, of 
how it is connected with the golden age, the relics of 
which are still the chief attractions of the country. 

The spirit of self-government seems to rest over 
Holland. The persistent windmills, the cosy farm- 
steads, the hamlets and villages, and the towns so self- 
possessed and debonair, are all symbols (or are easily 
mistaken for them) of a people going on in their own 
well-ordered way. Guicchardini, Sir Thomas Over- 
bury, Sir William Brereton, Sir William Temple, and 
many others, have described the majesty of civic 



ISO HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

rule in Holland in by-gone days, the pomp of the 
schepenen and the dread sentences of the vierschaar ; 
and even in the jovial gatherings in the canvases of 
the old painters we are not allowed to forget the 
rule and discipline of city life. These impressions, 
gathered from the landscape and the pictures and 
from travellers' tales, are corroborated by history, 
which tells of a nation fashioned out of many petty 
sovereignties and free towns, difficult to bind because 
of their individual laws and rights, and at once strong 
and weak because of their tenacity in them. Thus, 
whereas in describing most constitutions we begin with 
the sovereign authority and watch its decentralisation 
in local governments, in the case of Holland it is 
natural and more correct to start with these and to 
arrive by way of them at the central power. 

The unit of self-government in Holland is the com- 
mune Qgemeente), of which there are to-day some 
eleven hundred. In these, urban and rural districts 
and populations are mixed indiscriminately. The com- 
mune is a territory of varying extent. Sometimes it 
is a town or city, limited strictly by the walls ; more 
often its borders are spread wider. Most often of all 
it is a village or a group of villages with more or less 
land around it. In any case it is of historical growth : 
in form irregular, and often inconvenient, fixed with 
little or no consideration for the needs of the inhabi- 
tants. In many cases, no doubt, the communes could 
be traced back to the old *' marks," and to those erec- 
tions whereby the overlords, as early as Floris V. in 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 151 

the thirteenth century, sought to strengthen themselves 
against the power of the nobihty. The inconvenience 
caused by the retention of these ancient boundaries, — 
which is in curious contrast to the instinct of the Dutch 
for the pretty ordering of things — is illustrated in 
Delft, in situation, appearance, and historic associa- 
tions one of the most typical towns of Holland. In 
Delft three communes meet — Delft, Hof van Delft, 
and Vryenban — each with its own administration act- 
ing in severe independence, which causes innumerable 
and often ludicrous annoyances to the citizens. The 
Provincial-States, or rather a standing committee of 
the Provincial-States, have the power to legislate for a 
fresh delimitation, where they think fit; but in prac- 
tice the only changes they make are in the cases of 
growing cities, in order to give them rating powers 
over new suburbs, and a stronger hand in matters of 
sanitation and police. By the Franchise Act of 1896, 
however, communes with over 15,000 inhabitants have 
been divided into three wards, and some of the larger 
cities into more. Thus there are now nine wards in 
Amsterdam, five in Rotterdam, and four in Utrecht. 

At the head of each commune, appointed by the 
sovereign and acting as his representative, is the 
burgomaster, that important functionary, apparent 
source of all authority, to be thought of only as a 
grave and reverend Mynheer dispensing justice in the 
gate. As a matter of fact, the burgomaster as often 
as not is a young man of some family, not weighted 
particularly with either dignity or wisdom. The com- 



152 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

mune governs itself, and the fount of authority is the 
communal council ^gemeente raad), elected by the en- 
franchised inhabitants from among themselves. The 
number of councillors ranges from seven to forty-five, 
according to the population they represent; and their 
term of office is six years. Every second year, one- 
third of the Council retires, and the retiring members 
may be re-elected. 

The members of the communal councils must be 
Hollanders who have lived a year in the commune, 
and are not under twenty-three years of age. The elec- 
toral qualification will be most easily explained if we 
state first of all the qualification of voters for the mem- 
bers of the Second Chamber, and it may be allowable 
to do so in a tabulated form for the sake of clearness. 
By the new Franchise Act of 1896, then, — a halting 
step on the road to manhood suffrage, — the electoral 
qualification for the Second Chamber and for the Pro- 
vincial-States is possessed by 

All inhabitants of 25 years of age, not foreigners, able 
to exercise all civil and civic rights ; 

a. Who pay at least one guilder (i^. 8<3^.) towards the 

Imperial Capital or Income Tax ; or 
Who pay anything at all in the personeele belasting 
(that is to say, for the use of a house or of a 
part of it) ; or 

b. Who dwell in a house of a certain weekly rental (it 

varies, according to local situations and advan- 
tages, from \s. Afd. minimum to 4^. 2d, maxi- 
mum) ; or 




The Stadhuis at The Hague. 

From a drawing by Klrnkenberg. 



154 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

Who have a •certain annual salary or income (the 

limit for this varies also: the minimum is 225 

guilders, the maximum 350); or 
Who are registered in the Great Book of Consols 

as possessors of 100 guilders nominal, or as 

depositors in the Government Savings Bank of 

50 guilders ; or 
Who, irrespective of other qualifications, have 

passed an examination, fixed by law, for certain 

offices. 

Now the electoral qualification for the communal 
council differs from this in one point, and it is impor- 
tant. Under the second head must be added the pay- 
ment in the communal rates of a certain sum, which 
varies according to the importance of the commune. 
The communal council, therefore, has a greater power 
than the States-General over the purse of the citizens, 
and the local, communal franchise is restricted in an 
important degree in consequence. There exists, thus, 
the anomaly that men who have a vote in imperial 
affairs have no voice in the government of the muni- 
cipality in which they reside. To take an example, 
out of 94,305 inhabitants in the city of Utrecht in 
1897, the number of electors for the Second Chamber 
was 9,677, and that for the communal council only 
7,145. It is an interesting illustration of the tenacity 
of local rights which has been so powerful a condition 
in the history of Holland. 

In order that we may arrive at a better understand- 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 155 

ing of the powers of the council, and especially of those 
of the burgomaster, let us go back over the history of 
municipal government in Holland. We find ourselves 
at once in a maze of local usages and rights, but it is 
possible to find a key to it. In the period when Hol- 
land was a collection of fiefs, under counts, who held 
of different ruling Houses, the count, the overlord, had 
officials who represented him in the town or city, a 
sellout, or baljuw (the French hailli), and several 
schepenen, or sheriffs, who administered justice, and, 
with the burgomaster, formed the governing body. 
The position of the burgomaster varied in the differ- 
ent towns, but he represented the burghers and was 
chosen by them. In course of time, however, the 
counts, grown jealous of the burghers' power, limited 
it by choosing from among them a representative body, 
the vroedschapy or council of wise men, as it was 
called, although really it was composed of the 
wealthier citizens, between whom and the mass of the 
burghers there was a natural separation. At the same 
time they took away from the burghers the election of 
their burgomaster, and either kept it in their own 
hands, or placed it with the representative body and 
their own officials. In the fifteenth century, under 
Burgundian rule, the policy of which was always union 
and the centralisation of power, this representative body 
of the count's choosing became more and more a per- 
manent council, while the actual government was kept 
still more exclusively than ever in the hands of the 
count's officers. 



156 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

When we come down later, to the moment when the 
Seven Provinces threw off the yoke of Spain, we find 
an extraordinary variety of rule in the towns. Most 
of them had three or four burgomasters, several sheriffs, 
and a council or vroedschap. Dordrecht, which was in 
the unusual position, for a city in the province of Hol- 
land, of having only one burgomaster, v/ho, however, 
was clothed with great state, had in addition to a coun- 
cil an '' Old Council," composed of thirty or forty ex- 
councillors, and in this respect approximated more 
nearly to the government of the towns in the other six 
provinces. Everywhere, however, the power that had 
crossed from the counts to the burghers was well con- 
solidated in the council and the magisterial body; so 
much so that the representatives whom the cities sent 
to sit with the nobles in the General-States were mere 
machines for the delivery of the council's votes. From 
curious glimpses which we receive in Sir William 
Brereton's journal of a visit he paid to Holland in 
1634, when the struggle with Spain was coming to an 
end and the country, under Frederick Henry, was en- 
tering upon the most glorious period of its history, .we 
see less uniformity in municipal government than ever. 
Dordrecht was still singular with its one burgomaster 
who was always attended in public by his halberdiers. 
Rotterdam had three burgomasters, who held office 
'* some one, some two, some three years . . . they are 
equivalent to our bailiffs of cities or towns corporate," 
and no man waited on them in the street, though 
'* sometimes you might see a woman, a maid, following 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 157 

them." Sir William's party had some trouble about 
a stolen coat, and were referred to the burgomasters, 
whom after some delay they found '* in convivio 
qttodam, at the State Harbour, the Cross Keys, upon 
Erasmus Bridge," and greatly too busy to attend to 
the affair, but the '* baylie," who spoke English, did 
what he could for them, though he '' also was epicuris- 
ing at this time." Besides the three burgomasters and 
eight sheriffs and twenty-four aldermen, there were 
three '' friend-makers, to mediate," which no doubt 
was necessary if the burgomasters set the citizen an 
example of how to conduct business; the baylie, or 
high-sheriff, it is important to notice, was appointed 
durante vita, by the States-General, into whose hands, 
we see thus, had fallen some of the old powers of the 
counts. In Delft, again, there were four burgomas- 
ters and a crowd of other officials, including ** friend- 
makers," and forty-four members of the vroedsckap, 
"who," Sir William says, "are the common council, 
consenting to taxes and levies." The Hague, which 
was still "a village without a corporation, — a dorp 
— but the finest in all Holland," varied matters by 
choosing its two burgomasters from among the alder- 
men for three nlonths; while Haarlem had a high- 
sheriff for night as well as for day. Sometimes the 
power of the States-General was in the ascendant, 
sometimes that of the Stadhouder; in any case, the 
central authority was represented in the government 
of the towns in certain offices. Finally, after the 
experiments jn constitution-making, while the French 



158 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

were in the country, William L came to the throne, 
and bit by bit the government of the communes was 
put upon the basis on which it rests to~day. Having 
glanced at its development thus, we can examine it 
with an eye for the compromise that has been struck 
in it between local rights and the sovereign authority. 
The present-day communal councils, as we have 
seen, are popularly-elected bodies, or at any rate they 
are as popularly elected as the ** importance " of the 
town will permit. The burgomaster, on the other 
hand, is appointed by the sovereign. He carries on in 
his office the representation of the sovereign power in 
the communes, which in the case of the towns we have 
traced back to the fifteenth century. But although he 
is responsible to the commune for his administration 
and is paid by it, which in the case of every other per- 
son is a disqualification, the burgomaster is eligible as 
a member of the communal council. His position, in 
fact, is altogether peculiar. As the sovereign's repre- 
sentative, he is president of the council ; ex officio he has 
an advising- voice in its deliberations. If the electors 
choose him as a member, then, of course, he has a vote. 
By virtue of his office, he has further powers. He is 
at the head of the executive body in the commune, the 
College of Burgomaster and Wethouders. The num- 
ber of Wethouders, whom we may call magistrates, 
varies with the population; there must be two, and 
there cannot be more than four ; and they are chosen 
by and from among the members of the council Be- 
sides its administrative functions, this college prepares 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 159 

the resolutions to be taken by the council, — though it 
must be understood that any councillor has the right 
of initiating business. It is clear, therefore, that the 
burgomaster, if he is a strong man, can exercise a very 
considerable influence in the council, whether he pre- 
sides over it as a member with a vote, or presides 
merely with an advising voice, ex officio ; and his hands 
are strengthened by the power that is given him of 
staying, when he thinks right, the execution of any of 
the council's decrees for thirty days while he appeals 
to the sovereign. 

The burgomaster must be at least twenty-five years 
of age. Another qualification is that he be an inhab- 
itant of the commune ; but, ostensibly in the interests 
of the commune, the sovereign may appoint an out- 
sider to the office, and often he does so, though 
whether always in the commune's interests is not so 
certain. The salary attaching to the office varies with 
the importance of the commune; from as low as £40 
in some country places, it rises to ;^500 in Utrecht, and 
to ^625, nearly, in Amsterdam. The same man may 
be burgomaster and secretary (but not treasurer), and 
he may be burgomaster of two adjoining communes if 
they do not exceed five thousand souls. There is, to 
all intents and purposes, a profession of burgomaster. 
It is not the salary, however, that causes the office to 
be sought after, or not, at least, in the rural communes. 
It is looked upon as an honourable position for young 
men of some fortune, drawn from a class from which 
chiefly, since as far back as Sir William Temple's day, 



i6o HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

it has been customary to fill the civil offices of State ; 
and it is acknowledged that especially in communes 
composed for the most part of peasants these men play 
a useful and important, if not a very arduous role. 




The Burgomaster of Marken. 



As a rule, the councillors receive no salary. Provi- 
sion is made, however, for paying a member when 
necessary, and if one is paid, all are paid. Now that 
workinsf-men are finding- seats on the councils, though 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED i6i 

slowly, this provision is more frequently taken advan- 
tage of. The fees, called ** presence-money," never 
exceed the 4^". 2d. per session of about three hours 
allowed in Amsterdam. Within the last thirty years, 
a great change has come over the persomiel of the 
councils. Working-men members are still few, but 
there are many business men undertaking the duties 
now, whereas from 1800 to i860 the councils were 
composed almost entirely of doctors-of-law. This is 
an interesting corroboration of the impression recorded 
earlier that the highly educated classes in Holland 
have been exercising an unusually strong influence on 
her affairs, which now is being weakened. As a rule, 
the best men in all classes of society are willing to 
serve on the councils. Communal officials — the 
Commissary of Police, if there is one, clergymen, 
schoolmasters, and others — are not eligible as mem- 
bers, but almost all State officials are ; frequently they 
have much leisure time on their hands, and probably 
they are in a majority on the councils. It cannot be 
said, however, that the people take a warm interest In 
local government. At the bi-yearly elections, a per- 
sonal, partisan feeling is sometimes aroused; but Im- 
perial politics have no effect upon them, and it is hard 
work to bring half the electorate to the poll. 

It is not necessary to follow the councils into their 
routine of business, which exhibits no peculiar prin- 
ciple, unless it be that in some cases decisions are left 
to the arbitrament of the lot. One of the special duties 
of the council is the appointment of teachers and the 

II 



i62 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

supervision of education in the commune, of which 
more will be said in another chapter. Poor-relief, 
though it is part of the work of the local authority, is 
in a still greater degree a charge imposed by the 
churches upon themselves. Each religious body 
accepts the burden of its own poor; almost all of them 
have their own almshouses, some of them even their 
own hospitals. The cost of the relief of paupers un- 
attached to any church is all that the commune has to 
defray. The various sources from which the com- 
munes derive their revenue will be seen at a glance if 
they are set down in a tabulated form : — 

Property. Some of the possessions of the communes, 
especially lands belonging to the rural communes, 
are very valuable. 

Rating. The communes can impose: — 

An additional percentage of the Imperial property 
tax. The maximum is 40% of the tax on built 
property, and 10% of that on unbuilt. 

An additional percentage (in some cases as much 
as 70%) of Xh^ personeele be las ting, that is, the State 
tax for the use of a house, the number of chimneys, 
the number of servants, etc. 

A direct communal tax. 

Theatrical and dog licences. 

Petty customs, rriarket-money, port-dues, and the like. 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 163 

The communal councils cannot levy for libraries or 
museums ; the only special communal rates are those 
to cover the cost of opening up new roads and streets. 
In all their expenditure, the communal councils are 
supervised by the Provincial-States, by whom also the 
salaries of burgomaster, secretary, treasurer, and some 
other officials, are fixed. 

The Provincial-States, to which we will now direct 
our attention, need not hold it long. They have a 
certain historic interest as a link between Holland of 
to-day and Holland of history. But they are no more 
than a link. The present Provincial-States are not a 
development of the Stateii-Provinciaal of former cen- 
turies, who, after throwing off their allegiance to 
Philip of Spain in 1581, were the real sovereigns of 
the country, with the Stadhouder, when there was 
one, as their first Minister, though as often as not he 
was their master. Except in one respect, and that of 
the highest importance, the Provincial-States to-day 
are merely an administrative body, without any legis- 
lative power. The exception, as will be seen later in 
the chapter on " The Fight with the Waters," is the 
control of the defences against river and sea. It may be 
said that the Provincial-States must be political bodies, 
because the members of the First Chamber are elected 
by them ; but the First Chamber has greatly less power 
than the more popularly elected Second Chamber, 
and the political influence of the Provincial-States is 
not so great as might be supposed. They themselves 
are popularly elected ; but not for political ends. 



i64 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

Their duties are limited to the severely practical work 
of administration. With them lies the regulation of all 
provincial works, as well as of traffic and means of 
communication within the province, with a special 
view to the development of its commerce and indus- 
tries. They look after waterworks and waterways, 
grounds from which peat has been dug, mines, and 
polders; and the dike-survey is under their control. 
Poor lunatics are in their cure. The greater part of 
these duties, of course, is undertaken by the Stand- 
ing Committee, the executive body, under the control 
of which comes, partly at least, the government of 
charities, prisons, the militia, the reserves, and even 
of certain matters more directly the concern of the 
State, such as preliminary education. The Provincial- 
States, as has been said, are a purely administrative 
body. 

In their case, therefore, it is not necessary to trace 
any development. The great question of State Rights, 
the bugbear of the Dutch Republic, can best be dis- 
cussed in connection with the States-General. It is 
sufficient to say of the Provincial-States that, generally, 
in the conditions and rights of membership and in the 
conduct of business, there are many parallels between 
them and the communal councils. For example, the 
sovereign, who is represented in the commune by the 
burgomaster, is represented in the province by a 
commissary. At one time this official was governor 
of the province, and that is why the offices where the 
affairs of the province are conducted are still known 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 165 

popularly as the " Gouvernement." The commissary 
resides in the city in the province which the constitu- 
tion has fixed as the meeting-place of the States. He 
presides over that body and has an advising voice in 
it; and he has a vote in the Standing Committee, 
which is composed of himself and six members. 

The qualification to vote for members of the Pro- 
vincial-States is the same as that for members of the 
Second Chamber, with the addition, of course, that 
the electors must be inhabitants of the province. 
The members themselves, also, must have been in- 
habitants of the province for one year, and they must 
be at least twenty-five years of age. They are elected 
for a period of six years, and every third year half of 
them retire. In some provinces, the States contain as 
many as eighty members. To have all the electors 
voting for all the representatives would be too clumsy 
a method ; the provinces, therefore, are divided into 
electoral districts. 

The revenue of the Provinces, it may be added, is 
not large. Its main sources are a percentage of the 
imperial property and house taxes, and tolls, lock- 
dues, and provincial possessions. The States have 
the power to levy a provincial tax. In North Brabant, 
for example, tolls on the roads have been abolished, 
and the States have imposed a tax upon horses ; but 
this, like all provincial taxes, has been sanctioned by 
the two Chambers. And neither the Provincial-States 
nor the communal councils can impose excise duties, 
or any tax that would hinder trade. Throughout 
Holland, commerce is entirely free. 



i66 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

It has been said that the present Provincial-States 
are not a development of the Provincial-States that in 
former centuries played so important a part in Holland^ 
Let us see, now, what these earlier States were, and the 
position they really held in the country. In that way 
not only will light be thrown on the Parliamentary 
system of Holland to-day, but we shall have found 
some clue to the whole history of Holland. 

We have seen the towns rise to power as towns 
always did rise in the Middle Ages. The counts who 
ruled over them in the provinces, nominally for the 
emperors, in reality as independent overlords, bought 
the support of the burghers against the nobles, and 
paid for it in grants of privileges. In course of time 
they called together the burghers with the nobles to 
consult with them about war and supplies and other 
questions affecting the province ; until at length this 
privilege was interpreted by the burghers as a right. 
Thus the two Estates of Holland, the nobles and the 
towns, came to be represented in council, and the 
representatives, being identified with those who sent 
them, were known as the States of the province. The 
smaller towns, however, finding themselves treated as 
of little account, kept away from these gatherings ; 
they kept away the more readily that by doing so 
they managed to evade payment of some of the moneys 
voted at them. To some extent, they continued to be 
represented by the nobles ; but the nobles also, being 
in a minority, fell away in their attendance. The gentry 
are called to the Provincial council for order's sake, 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 167 

but the merchants and tradesmen are predominant, Sir 
Thomas Overbury wrote in the seventeenth century, 
and so it was long before the war with Spain. In the 
Provincial-States, the cities were predominant. 

Take Holland and Zeeland, the nucleus of the 
Union. In the Provincial-States of Holland, that is of 
the present North- and South-Holland, the nobles, few 
in number, were represented by one vote, and one vote 
each was possessed by six great towns, whose names 
are interesting. They were Dordrecht, Haarlem, Delft, 
Leiden, Amsterdam, and Gouda, — the large towns to- 
day. We see how ancient a place the present Holland 
is. In Zeeland, again, the nobles had one vote, and 
the Abbot of Middelburg had one, representing the 
large possessions of the Abbey of St. Nicolaas in the 
province; while the towns with a vote each were 
Middelburg, Zierikzee, Goes, Tholen, and Reimerswaal. 
All of these, save the last, still exist, though fallen from 
their old estate ; Reimerswaal with all its civic pride 
was swallowed up by the sea in the seventeenth 
century, and lies at the bottom of that arm of the Schelde 
which the traveller crosses between South Beveland and 
Bergen-op-Zoom. As it was in Holland and Zeeland, 
so it was in all the seventeen provinces which were 
brought together under Charles V. Each of the 
provinces had its rights, to which, like the towns, it 
clung tenaciously; each of the Provincial-States had 
its own peculiar constitution. Even thus early we see 
the persistence in State Rights which worked the ruin 
of Holland. 



i68 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

Philip the Good, of the House of Burgundy, whose 
interference with the government of the cities in order 
to strengthen the central power in them, has been 
noted already, pursued the same tactics with the States 
of the provinces. From time to time, he called together 
all the Provincial-States to advise with him, and this 
policy was continued by Charles V., who during 
his reign summoned at least fifty of these councils. 
But both failed to inform the Provincial-States in 
general council with any authority. Especially in the 
north, many of the States would not attend. Friesland 
refused, holding that she was prevented by her ancient 
privilege of never having to cross her own borders to 
appear before a foreign judge. Drente, Overysel, 
Groningen, and Gelderland had their own reasons for 
staying away. And there was one condition of these 
united meetings which made them ineffective. The 
decisions taken in them were not binding on the minor- 
ity. It was so in the Provincial-States themselves. 
The resolutions of the majority were disregarded by the 
nobles and towns who had voted against them. The 
counts, naturally, contended that they were binding, 
and if they were strong enough they enforced their 
opinion ; but, generally, they were not strong enough, 
and the minority acted as they had voted. Precisely 
the same principle of weakness was introduced into 
the general gatherings of the States. 

Charles V. abdicated in favour of his son Philip. 
Philip n. of Spain had still less respect than his 
father for the privileges of the Netherlanders. He 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 169 

was going to rule them with a hand of iron, and re- 
gardless of their rights and customs make them con- 
form to his will in religion and government and policy. 
At first, he was opposed by the nobles only, but by- 
and-bye the burghers were roused to revolt, and at 
length, in 1568, when Alva was devastating the coun- 
try by his bloody policy, William of Orange took the 
field. Several years were to elapse before allegiance 
to Philip was thrown off. But we are not going to 
follow the rise of the United Provinces, or the fortunes 
of the Republic in the succeeding centuries ; our con- 
cern is only with a few incidents in that history which 
illumine the development of the Dutch Constitution. 
One of these was the Pacification of Ghent, in 1576. It 
was the union of Holland and Zeeland in the north with 
thirteen provinces in the south in the demand for the 
restoration of their liberties, and it recognised the meet- 
ing of the States of these provinces in general assem- 
bly for a purpose in which they were all united. It is 
necessary to point out a distinction, not, however, rec- 
ognised by all, between such an assembly as that of 
the Pacification of Ghent, — the General States it might 
be called, — and the States-General. The General 
States was the assembly of all the Provincial -States of 
the Union in general council, and in Holland we find it 
meeting at The Hague, as late as 165 1, under the presi- 
dency of the poet Cats, — the " Great Meeting " it was 
called — to consult on questions of government. The 
States-General, on the other hand, was an assembly of 
the representatives of the Provincial-States, soon to 



I/O HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

become a permanent assembly, which may be said to 
have been estabhshed by the Union of Utrecht in 
1579. Between that event and the Pacification of 
Ghent, much had happened. Alva had reduced the 
southern provinces. Between north and south, the 
difference in religion had become more and more a 
marked line of cleavage. The opposition to Spain was 
consolidated in the northern provinces; and when 
these leagued together in the Union of Utrecht, and 
soon after threw off their allegiance to Philip, the first 
lines of the Dutch Constitution were 1 ^. 

It must not be supposed that even in their oppo- 
sition to Spain the northern provinces were brought 
into union at once. A few of them signed the Union 
in 1579; the others joined piecemeal. Parts of pro- 
vinces came in, and separate towns; separate towns 
and parts of provinces held out. Nearly twenty years 
passed before all the signatures were received. It 
was the old story, — jealousy of State rights and of 
civic privileges. Yet by the conditions of the Union 
these rights and privileges were carefully guarded. 
The provinces were united *' in eternity," and were to 
remain united as if they were one : so it was laid down ; 
but the condition, quite irreconcilable with that, was 
admitted that each town and each province was in- 
sured its own privileges. No attempt was made to 
bring uniformity of constitution into the Provincial- 
States. The provinces were to govern themseh !S as 
they liked, even as we have seen the towns were 
doing. 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 171 

It was the representatives of the Provincial-States 
who met together as the States-General : at first from 
time to time, in different cities, Utrecht, Delft, The 
Hague, now in one, now in the other; but shortly 
after the departure of Leicester, in 1593, as a perma- 
nent body which gradually took the government into 
its own hands, including much of that which hitherto 
had been in those of the council of State. But it was 
constituted in a most irregular manner, which lasted 
all during the Republic. There were, it is true, as 
many votes as .here were provinces, but there was 
no uniformity in the representation of the provinces. 
The accounts of the meetings of the States-General 
given by travellers in Holland at different times seem 
quite irreconcilable, owing to the fluctuating number 
of deputies mentioned in them. It is impossible to 
follow Sir William Brereton, who wrote about 1634, 
when he attempts to detail the representation of each 
province. Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, who made some notes 
on the government of Holland one hundred and fifty 
years later, gets to the root of the matter when she 
says that the chief depositaries of the sovereignty were 
not the S :ates-General, but the Provincial-States, of 
whose deputies the former were composed, and with- 
out whose consent they never voted upon important 
measures. She adds that in the States-General, each 
province had one vote ; which, with the reasons for 
it, n ight be delivered by an unlimited number of 
deputies. Thus it appears that at the very end of 
the Republic, at which time Mrs. Radcliffe wrote, the 



172 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

confusion in the government, which we find when the 
war with Spain was going on, was only worse con- 
founded. During the whole Republic, though there 
were only seats in the council-chamber of the States- 
General for twenty-two representatives, there were 
always far more present, and sometimes several hun- 
dreds. The vote and the reasons for it were delivered 
by the ** unlimited number of deputies; " and the vote 
was in accordance with instructions from the Provin- 
cial-States, with whom lay the real sovereignty. We 
might go further, and say that the depositaries of the 
sovereignty were not the Provincial-States, but rather 
the nobles and the councils in the towns, whom they 
represented. The States-General had to await the 
decision of the Provincial-States, the Provincial-States 
that of the nobles, and of the towns, of which there 
were nearly a hundred. It is a fact that some, twelve 
hundred persons had to record a vote before impor- 
tant action could be determined upon by the central 
authority. And all this, be it remembered, in a coun- 
try that had to fight Spain and England and France, 
and to build up and maintain an empire. 

This, however, was not all. In many cases unani- 
mous consent was necessary before any action could 
be taken; and in any case the vote, when it was cast, 
did not bind the minority. It generally did, it is true, 
under a strong and masterful Stadhouder like Maurits ; 
but the question whether it did or did not was ever 
cropping up to paralyse the central government. Be- 
tween the provinces, there was a constant clashing of 



174 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

interests, and an unequal distribution of burdens and 
of influence. Each province had one vote ; but for 
long, out of every hundred guilders contributed to the 
national treasury, the province of Holland paid fifty- 
eight and Overysel three and a half. It is little wonder 
that the province which paid the piper thus should 
seek to call the tune, as was the case after the Peace 
of Munster, when the Stadhouder William H. had to 
lead an army against Amsterdam to compel the up- 
keep of the soldiery in the province. Drente, again, 
had signed the Union early, and she contributed one 
per cent to the treasury, but she had no representation 
in the States- General. Immediately after the Union 
she had been occupied by the enemy. She did not 
lose her right to a vote thereby, but only had been 
prevented from exercising it: so it was ui^ed in her 
behalf when she claimed representation later. Her 
claim, however, was refused. The maritime provinces 
could not allow the land provinces to be strengthened 
by a single vote. The difference of interests between 
the two was always a trouble, and sometimes a serious 
trouble, ^f^he union of Utrecht, the first Constitution 
of the Republic, had made provision for the settlement 
of differences between the provinces by referring them 
to the Stadhouder; it did not take into consideration 
the possibility of there not being a Stadhouder. 
Again, it allowed the provinces to have separate Stad- 
houders, or to have the same one in common, without 
defining the powers of the office. Thus no more 
check was put upon too great a consolidation of power 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 175 

in the central authority than was put upon an excess- 
ive diffusion of sovereignty tliroughout the provinces. 
Between those two extreme dangers of a RepubHc, 
Holland was tossed. The diffusion of sovereignty we 
have seen ; the tyranny of the Stadhouders was no 
less clear. The office had become hereditary in the 
House of Orange. Position, wealth, something like 
genius, above all, enormous services to the State, 
placed the Princes of Orange in the position of 
master, when nominally they were only servants. The 
differences among the provinces were weapons in their 
hands. It was union that the Republic required, and 
the Princes of Orange fought for union. That was 
their policy, whether they were sacrificing themselves 
and their fortunes, or Olden Barneveldt and De Witt. 
But it was Ji policy that realised their ambitions, and 
their ambitions, realised, realised the needs of Holland. 
"^The strong Stadhouders usurped a central authority 
which the Union failed to provide. They became 
hereditary Stadhouders, the '' Eminent Heads " of the 
State in name, sovereigns in all but name. They had 
the filling up of numerous offices. By-and-by, they 
made alliances in marriage with royal families. For- 
eign powers might treat with the States-General as 
representatives of the Republic, but they asked 
audience of the Prince of grange. In this way the 
power of the States-General was doubly weakened. ^ 
Moreover, it had a rival in the council of state, a 
body older than itself, and less subject to provincial 
. dissensions, since the provinces were represented on 



1/6 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

it in proportion as they contributed to the national 
expenses. At the beginning of the RepubHc this 
council was much more powerful than the States- 
General. Very soon, however, its influence became 
less. Maurits weakened it greatly. But it never was 
broken, and its power, now greater, now less, compli- 
cated still further the conditions of government. It 
had the affairs of the army in its hands without mak- 
ing any easier for the Stadhouder and the States the 
delicate question of the control of the troops. It 
was the council of finance, or was during a period at 
least, and as its budget was sent to the States-General, 
to be laid by them in turn before the Provincial-States, 
there was interminable delay here also ; and very often, 
in the end, the province of Holland had to pay the 
deficiency caused by the neglect or the refusal of 
other provinces to contribute their share. 

The Constitution of the Republic, in a word, was an 
impossible constitution. There was not one Republic, 
there were seven. Before the Spanish wars, the sover- 
eign power, whether it was Burgundy or Austria or 
Spain, had held the provinces together in a manner. 
When it was thrown off, nothing took its place. The 
States-General did not, for the sacrifice of their rights 
by the provinces, which alone could have made that 
possible, was never dreamed of. The Stadhouders 
did in a measure, but their authority depended on 
individual personality and the temporary needs of the 
nation. A pressing danger was as an authority to the 
provinces, but when it was removed dissension and 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 177 



secessions returned. The 
wonder is not that at last 
the Republic collapsed, 
but that, constituted as it 
was of weaknesses, there 
should have been found 
in it the noble and virtu- 
ous elements to hold it 
together for such marvel- 
lous performance. 

The old Republic may 
be said to have fallen 
with the flight of Wil- 
liam, the Fifth Stadhou- 
der, to England in Jan- 
uary, 1795. In 1 81 3 his 
son returned to Holland, 
to be crowned as Wil- 
liam I. During the years 
between these two dates 
Holland was a Republic 

— the Batavian Republic 

— experimenting in gov- 
erning herself by systems 
based upon the latest 
French models; then a 
kingdom, dependent on 
France, and with Louis 
Napoleon on the throne ; 
and lastly a mere prov- 



7^ 




A Peep in the Hague. 
From a drawing by Klinkenberg. 



12 



178 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

ince of France, with her capital, Amsterdam, counted 
the third city in the Empire. In each period there are 
one or two events that throw h'ght upon the present 
Constitution, to which we have been leading up in this 
survey. 

The leaders of the Patriot party, which brought in 
the French and expelled the Stadhouder, were im- 
pressed with the need of union. They were also 
strongly influenced by French revolutionary ideas. 
The spirit of States sovereignty was not dead : it 
existed in the provinces, and showed itself in the 
National Convention, which made the first attempts at 
drawing up a Constitution. The extreme Unionists, 
therefore, effected a coup d'etat, cleared the conven- 
tion of the party of State Rights, deprived the fol- 
lowers of Orange of all power, and proceeded anew 
to the business of constitution-making. Church and 
State were separated. The aristocracy of the towns 
were reduced. To break down the old State feeling, 
the boundaries of the provinces were disregarded in 
the political divisions of the country. In place of the 
provinces came eight departments, and these eight 
departments were broken up into eight equal sections. 
They were also broken up into rings, from which the 
members of the departmental governments were sent 
up. Irrespective of the departments, the country was 
divided into ninety-four districts, each with 20,000 in- 
habitants. Each district sent up a member of Parlia- 
ment, elected by a complicated system of nominations 
from sub-districts. The Representative body consisted 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 179 

of two Chambers and kept the legislative power in its 
own hands, while the administrative power was en- 
trusted to ministers of its own choice. This elaborate 
Constitution was unmanageable. It threw^ upon the 
administrative body too much work, and it gave the 
departmental governments (so they thought) too little 
power. But though a new one was called for almost 
immediately, this Constitution had a lasting influence. 
Before it could be modified, Napoleon had interfered 
to pave the way for the annexation of Holland, which 
followed a year or two later. Of the Constitutions 
imposed upon Holland before the Restoration, it need 
only be said that they recognised again some measure 
of State Rights, and restored the old provincial divi- 
sions of the country; they were more moderate, so 
that, for example, the members of the Orange party 
were no longer excluded from office ; and, ultimately, 
were more monarchical. With Louis Napoleon at the 
head of the State, the legislative body consisted of 
thirty-nine members, and there was a States council of 
thirteen. The ten provinces were given equal rights, 
and there was a governor and a council in each. The 
Code Napoleon, specially adapted to the kingdom of 
Holland, and a jury system, were introduced. The 
Code remains, but the juries have disappeared. Finally, 
in 1 8 10, when Holland was incorporated with France, 
the departments were given prefects and under-pre- 
fects, and French names ; the burgomasters became 
mayors; conscription was introduced; the freedom 
of the Press was limited; and education, for which 



i8o HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

Schimmelpennick, Napoleon's pensionary, had done 
so much, fell into a deplorable condition. Then the 
country, wearied out and drained of its money, wel- 
comed a Prince of Orange as its king. 

The troubles of Holland, however, were far from 
being at an end. In the Constitution with which 
William L came to the throne, in 1814, three great 
principles were embodied : freedom of religion, equal- 
ity before the law, and the independence of the juridi- 
cal power. There re-appeared in it many of the 
institutions of the old Republic. The Estates were 
still represented in the Provincial-States, which were 
elected, by the most highly-taxed subjects, from among 
the nobles and the councils of the towns. The Pro- 
vincial-States chose the States-General, which sat in 
one Chamber, and one-fourth of the members had to 
be selected from the nobility. But it was sought to 
avoid the weakness of the Republic by giving the 
States-General complete independence in legislation 
from the Provincial-States, which were reduced accord- 
ingly to be a merely administrative body. Scarcely 
was this Constitution adopted, than, by the Congress 
of Vienna, the Belgian provinces were incorporated 
with Holland, which it was intended by this means to 
reinstate among the Great Powers. The experiment 
was not successful. Between the northern and the 
southern provinces there was friction constantly; aris- 
ing partly, as of old, out of the religious question, and 
still more from their opposing fiscal policies. Belgium 
was protectionist and at the same time liberal ; on 



i82 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

which very account free-trading Holland seemed to 
become more conservative. The union with Belgium 
had made a revision of the Constitution necessary, and 
among the changes was one that considerably reduced 
the representation of the Estates, and gave the land- 
ward villages a share with the towns in local govern- 
ment. After the revolt and separation of the Belgian 
provinces in 1830, Holland carried these modifications 
still further, as we see in the Constitution of 1848. By 
that Constitution Holland virtually is still regulated. 
We can now take a brief glance, therefore, at the pres- 
ent system of government in Holland, which we can 
do with a better understanding of its development after 
this rapid survey of changes and revolutions in the 
past. 

The communal councils and the Provincial-States, 

we have seen, are popularly elected bodies. In the 
f 
' same way, the legislative power in the State lies with 

the people through their representatives in the States- 
General. The name States-General remains, but the 
Estates themselves have disappeared completely. The 
States-Provincial have not a shred left of their old 
sovereignty : they are, as the reader has been asked to 
note already, merely an administrative body. The 
States-General, on the other hand, consist of two 
elective Chambers : the First is elected by the Pro- 
vincial-States, the Second, the more important, popu- 
larly known as The Chamber (^de Kamer)^ directly 
by the people. 

The fifty members of the First Chamber are chosen 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 183 

from among the most highly taxed subjects in each 
province, the quaUfication being so fixed that there is 
one ehgible person for every three thousand of the 
population. Since 1887, however, men occupying, 
or having occupied, certain high positions in the 
State, though not possessed of the necessary money 
qualification, are eligible for election to the First 
Chamber. The members are elected for a term of 
nine years, and every ,^year one third retires. 

Earlier in this chapter it was shown that the elec- 
toral qualification for the Second Chamber is the 
same as that for the Provincial-States, and that 
the franchise for them often is wider than that for 
the communal councils. The Act of 1896, by which 
it is fixed, also created one hundred electoral districts, 
each sending one representative to the Second Cham- 
ber. Of these districts, Amsterdam with Nieuwe 
Amstel contains nine, Rotterdam five. The Hague 
three, and Utrecht two. The Second Chamber dis- 
solves every four years. No one is allowed to be a 
member of it who is not at least thirty years of 
age. 

The Chambers sit at The Hague, in the Binnenhof, 
the old palace of the Stadhouders. The Binnenhof is 
the true heart of Holland. It was here that the Counts, 
and later the Princes of Hainault and Bavaria, had 
their palace, and lived and ruled. The building in it 
where the archives of the Home Office are preserved 
to-day was the hall of the Knights of the Middle 
Ages. It was in the Binnenhof that the representa- 



i84 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

tives of the Seven Provinces formally threw off their 
allegiance to Spain and founded the Republic. In 
the court in front of it, a little more than a hundred 
years later, Olden Barneveldt was beheaded, sacrificed 
to the dissensions through which ultimately the Re- 
public was to fall. It witnessed the welcome of 
William III. of England, the humiliation of the Fifth 
Stadhouder's flight, Holland's humiliation when Louis 
Napoleon entered it as her king, — all those changes 
which we have been following in this chapter. 

It is in the midst of these associations, inspiring, 
or so they ought to be, to every Dutchman, that the 
States-General meet. The room of the First Chamber 
was once the meeting-place of the States of Holland 
and Friesland. The Second Chamber sits in the old 
dancing-hall, in which William the Fifth Stadhouder 
appeared for the last time in public before h6 left 
for England. The Chambers sit together at the open- 
ing and closing sessions, and at the coronation of the 
sovereign. If it should ever happen that they have 
to take the reins of government into their own hands, 
owing to there being no capable heir, they will have to 
be elected anew, in double numbers, and sit together. 
The Second Chamber meets under the direction of a 
president who is nominated for the session by the 
sovereign. Any member of it can initiate business, and 
has the right to propose amendments to any measure. 
The First Chamber, on the other hand, has not the 
/right of initiative or of amendment. It can only 
reject or accept bills as they are sent to it from the 




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1 86 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

Second Chamber. The president is appointed for j 
' each meeting by the sovereign. 

In both Chambers there are committees which con- 
sider proposed legislative measures, and report upon 
them to the government. It is the usual practice for 
ministers to answer their report before the question 
is debated in the Chamber. Government bills are 
submitted first of all to the Second Chamber, the 
members of which may question the government, and 
the ministers in charge of them are present, and reply, 
unless they put forward a plea that to do so would be 
prejudicial to the interests of the country. After the 
various interpolations, the usual course is for the 
Chamber to pass a Motion of Order, giving its clear 
opinion on the matter in hand. If the subject under 
debate is of vital importance and causes strong party 
feeling, the opposition may move a vote of no con- 
fidence ; or the ministerial following may move a 
vote of confidence ; either of which courses may lead 
to the resignation of the government. 

The ministers are at the heads of eight departments : 
Foreign Affairs; Justice; Home Affairs; Finance; 
War ; the Navy ; . Waterstaat, Commerce, and Indus- 
try ; and the Colonies. They are chosen by the sover- 
eign, who has the right of abolishing any department, 
and of creating a new one, as was done in 1877 when 
Waterstaat, Commerce, and Industry were separated 
from the Department for Home Affairs and erected into 
one by themselves. A Department for Agriculture 
has been created recently, but without a minister at 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 187 

the head of It. The true government lies with the 
body of ministers: they are Its guiding hands; they 
advise the sovereign, whose person Is inviolable, and 
are responsible to the nation. There is no provision 
in the Constitution for the sovereign and ministers 
consulting together; but they do so consult. All 
administrative decrees of the sovereign have to be 
countersigned by one of the ministers. It may be said 
that in that respect the sovereign's power Is merely 
nominal; but the influence of a strong ruler upon the 
whole process of government can be very great. The 
sovereign .has the power to declare war without con- 
sulting the Chambers ; the necessary supplies, how- 
ever, must be voted by the representatives. He need 
not report to them treaties made with foreign powers 
if he considers it against the interests of the State to 
do so ; although treaties embodying cession of terri- 
tory or pecuniary obligations, or touching a matter of 
lawful rights, must be confirmed by the States-General, 
unless previously they have conferred special powers 
upon the sovereign. The sovereign maintains an army 
and a navy, appoints, promotes, and dismisses all offi- 
cers, appoints ambassadors and consuls, and, with cer- 
tain exceptions, regulates the salaries of officials who 
are paid out of the country's treasury. The preroga- 
tive of mercy is In his hands, and he can create nobility 
and bestow orders. Further, and this is an Important 
point, he has the right to dissolve Parliament, and he 
can propose measures to the representatives, and can 
reject their measures. 



1 88 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

The sovereign is assisted in carrying out these duties 
by an advising body chosen by himself, known as the 
council of State. This is the Raad van Staat^ which, 
we have seen, has existed in Holland for centuries. 
The sovereign is president of this body, which com- 
prises a vice-president and fourteen members, and a 
crown prince becomes a member of it as soon as he 
reaches the age of eighteen. Government bills are 
examined by the council of State before they are intro- 
duced into the Second Chamber, and when a private 
l\ member's bill has passed both Chambers it goes to the 
/ council of State before it receives the royal assent. 
As a matter of practice, however, ministers pay just so 
much attention to the deliberations of this council as 
they think useful. The really important function of 
the body is the exercise of the royal power in certain 
cases foreseen by the Constitution, as, for example, 
when the sovereign is unable to reign and there is no 
regent, or when the succession is in doubt. In addi- 
tion to these councillors of State proper, the sovereign 
may appoint Honorary Councillors, to the number of 
fifteen, who when called upon to advise with the Raad 
van Staat are given equal powers with the ordinary 
members. As this council of State is called upon to 
advise the sovereign in certain cases where a final 
appeal is made to him, it has to that extent some judi- 
cial powers ; but, except when it takes up the royal 
power, it cannot interfere directly with government, 
and the right to dissolve Parliament is never placed in 
its hands. 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 189 

In the Second Chamber, the Lefts are the Liberals, 
while the Rights are the Clericals, — the Roman Cath- 
olics and the Calvinists who sit in strange alliance 
here. The extreme Radicals in the Chamber are very 
few. The Liberal party, however, is split into Mode- 
rates and Progressives, the differences between them 
having been emphasised in connection with the recent 
Reform Act. The Progressives supported a bill, in- 
troduced by a Liberal government, which practically 
would have given the country manhood suffrage ; but 
the measure was withdrawn when the Chamber 
accepted an amendment greatly narrowing the effect 
of the franchise clauses, and at a general election 
which followed the government was defeated. The 
timid Act of 1896, the provisions of which we have 
seen, was a com.promise between the Progressive Lib- 
erals and the various groups with more conservative 
and plutocratic tendencies. But the real dividing line 
between political parties in Holland, it must be remem- 
bered, is Religion. The alliance which has sprung up 
between Calvinist and Roman Catholic has given a 
piquancy to Dutch politics of recent years, and is one 
cause of the revived public interest in them which is 
so marked in the present day. 

There are one or two points in the representative 
system as it is found in Holland to which it is neces- 
sary to call special attention. The right of dissolving 
Parliament, as we have seen, lies, not with ministers, 
but with the sovereign, and as generally happens when 
it does lie so, he uses it so rarely that it need scarce be 



190 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

considered as a factor in the system. The hold upon 
the representatives, by both the government and the 
people, is weakened in consequence. In Holland, 
however, parties seldom degenerate into groups to 
such an extent that there is no clear issue to determine 
the situation, and thus, though the selection of minis- 
ters is in the king's hands, there are almost always 
parliamentary, not royal. Cabinets. If a minister 
falls, almost invariably all the ministers resign with 
him, and, in most cases, they do not return to office 
without their colleague. The most important point 
of all is that ministers are not chosen wholly from 
within the legislature, and that those of them who 
are, and accept office, do not as a rule seek re-election 
to the Chambers. As a matter of fact, most ministers 
are selected from the Second Chamber, and the Pre- 
mier almost always is. But it is not at all times possi- 
ble to select ministers from within the legislature, for, 
with few exceptions, they are chosen for departments 
in keeping with their professional fitness. The Minister 
for War is an officer of the Army, the Foreign Minister 
is a diplomatist, the Minister for Waterstaat an engi- 
neer. And as there cannot always be found in the 
Chambers men suitable, in this respect, for office, men 
who are, have to be sought for outside of the legislature. 
Ministers have the right to sit in both Chambers; 
indeed, as they introduce and defend government 
measures, the Chambers have a claim upon their at- 
tendance. Moreover, they are eligible for election to 
either Chamber. Some twenty years ago, one of the 



HOW HOLLx^ND IS GOVERNED 191 

ministers of the day was a member of the Second 
Chamber; and in the present government there are 
two ministers who are members of that Chamber. 
They entered it at the election of June 1897, were 
made ministers, stood for re-election, and were success- 
ful. But these are probably the only exceptions in 
recent times to the rule that ministers, even when they 
have been chosen from within the legislature, do not 
allow themselves to be re-elected to either Chamber. 

In this sketch of the methods of government in 
Holland to-day, the attempt has been made to corre- 
late them with the political history of the past, not 
with the thought that we can trace the growth of a 
system of government, for anything like a perfect 
development there was not, but only that the reader 
might have suggested to him, in the existing political 
institutions of Holland, no less than in others that we 
have considered, the enduring qualities of the national 
character. Stress was laid especially upon the per- 
sistence with which the Individualism of the Dutch 
has been displayed throughout their political history. 
More remarkable still, however, and more naturally- 
impressed upon our minds at the present moment, is 
the vitality of the House of Orange. *' Oranje boven ! " 
was the cry with which the Dutch went into their long 
battle with Spain, the cry that time after time since 
then has resounded through their cities ; and as I 
write these pages, the words are leaping to all Dutch 
lips and the sentiment that inspires them is filling all 




Portrait of H. M. Queen Wilhelmina, in Frisian Costume. 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 193 

Dutch hearts. The genius of the House of Orange / 
is to be " on top ! " Three centuries ago, this noble / 
family, at the head of which was a woman of singu- 
larly simple and sterling character, a true mother of 
him who was to be Father William to his people, 
emerged above the political horizon of Europe. By 
the sacrifice of many sons, it endeared itself to a nation. 
Through a succession of warriors and statesmen of 
the first order it consolidated its own and its country's 
position. With a leap. Orange became Holland, and 
Holland became one of the great Powers. There 
followed times of trouble, betrayals of trust, dissen- 
sions, humiliations, the shipwreck of the House and 
of the State; but both survived together. I do not 
know whether the story is a testimony more to the 
vitality of the family or to the enduring affections 
of the nation. And at the present moment, both are 
holding the eyes of the world. The real significance 
of the rejoicings of Holland over the installation of 
Queen Wilhelmina on the throne is missed if we see 
in it merely the expression of a nation's loyalty to a 
sovereign and its delight that a minority has been 
happily passed. The hold of the young queen upon 
her people is altogether singular. She is their pet, — 
the pet of their fancy. With her personality they are 
only slightly acquainted. She has been brought up by 
a wise mother in a strict seclusion. Her people believe 
that she has grown into a woman of strong and inde- 
pendent will, patriotic, cultivated as Dutchwomen are 
cultivated, homely as they are homely. But of her 

13 



194 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

real personality little is known by her people, and by 
an unwritten law the Dutch press is prevented from 
professing to instruct them further. She is the em- 
bodiment of an idea; that is how their affection has 
grown round so vague a personality. A^t the thought 
of the minority over, and the queen ascending to the 
throne alone, ruling, though it be for a short time only, 
without a consort, wise Dutchmen give a sigh of re- 
lief. One of the great dangers of their country is 
past. In her person, thus. Queen Wilhelmina stands 
for safety. Yet wise Dutchmen know that behind the 
rejoicings of the coronation lurk new dangers; that, 
for example, of alliance through marriage with reign- 
ing houses, to which their whole history points a warn- 
ing finger. For it has to be remembered that Queen 
Wilhelmina holds her people's affections, not wholly 
because of her youth, not at all because she is the 
queen, but because she is a Princess of Orange who 
rules over them. A queen of the House of Orange: 
that is the idea she embodies. If, unhappily, she had 
not lived to her eighteenth birthday, to fill the place of 
the immortal heroes of her House, Holland, it is not 
improbable, would have become a Republic. Holland 
is not now, at any rate, less Republican than ever she 
was, and Dutchmen with the welfare of their country 
closely at heart cannot but at times reflect that the 
future may hold events whereby it might be convulsed 
with an internal struggle. In the moment of the na- 
tional rejoicings, however, these forebodings may be 
put aside. A young queen is on the throne, ruling 



HOW HOLLAND IS GOVERNED 195 

over a happy and contented and patriotic people, at 
the head of a nation that at this auspicious moment 
shows signs of a remarkable quickening of industry 
and science and art and literature; secure in her place 
in her people's hearts because she is of the family of 
Orange, for whose services the Dutch have ever shown 
themselves affectionately and enduringly grateful. 




The Palace in the Noordeinde. 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS. 

A GREAT part, and by far the most characteristic 
part, of the government of Holland comes under 
the head of the Waterstaat. Previously to 1877, the 
Waterstaat was controlled by the Minister for Home 
Affairs ; in that year it was erected, with Commerce 
and Industry, into a separate Department, under a 
Minister for Waterstaat, Handel en Nijverheid. This 
Minister, under the Sovereign, has a general supervi- 
sion over all the various works for repelling the outer 
waters and expelling the inner, enemies against which 
he keeps an army of engineers constantly employed. 

The outer waters, so called, are the sea and the 
rivers : it is necessary to remember the distinction in 
seeking to understand the drainage system. The inner 
are the morasses, the marshy pools and soft fens 
caused by overflow or rainfall, the inland seas where 
the outer waters washed out the soft mud or for which 
the Hollanders had made a bed in their already over- 
run country by exhausting the peat. Of the inroads 
of the ocean we have already heard much. The inn- 
keeper in the Betuwe brought home to us the dangers 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 197 

amid which, even now, the people by the Rhine and 
the Maas hve when the river waters are out. The in- 
vasions of ocean and river are readily pictured without 
any intimate knowledge of Holland. They threaten 




'tUlA^ 



Thk Little Mill. 
From a drawing by Willeni Maris. 



most countries, and have been hurled on occasion 
against most, and it is not difficult to imagine the 
nature, even the magnitude, of the defences raised 
against them. But with the inner waters it is otherwise. 



198 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

They are different from the inner waters elsewhere 
because Holland is different from other countries; 
they are greater in extent, a greater menace, at once 
more difficult of reclamation and more urgently re- 
quiring to be reclaimed, as we can realise only when 
we have learned that the half of Holland itself is below 
the level of the outer waters, is guarded from them 
by dikes and dunes that it is perilous to pierce by 
exits for the inner waters, and yet, if the inner 
waters are not carried out through these dunes and 
dikes somehow, is certain to be submerged and its 
inhabitants drowned like rats in a trap. Quite evi- 
dently, the drainage of the country is a work of com- 
bined reclamation and defence that Is peculiarly 
characteristic of Holland. 

It may be thought that in the following pages this 
point is urged at unnecessary length and with super- 
fluous detail. The character of Holland is a matter 
of common renown, it will be said. For all English- 
speaking people, at any rate, the satire of Andrew 
Marvell has made it memorable. 

" How did they rivet with gigantic piles 

Thorough the centre their new-catched miles, 
And to the stake a struggling country bound, 
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground, 
Building their watery Babel far more high 
To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky ! 

■# 

Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid, 
And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played, 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 199 

As if on purpose it on land had come 

To show them what 's their mare liberuin. 

A daily deluge over them does boil ; 

The earth and water play at level coil. 

The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed, 

And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest. 

And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs saw 

Whole shoals of Dutch served up for Cabillau, 

Or, as they over the new level ranged 

For pickled herring, pickled heerin changed. 

Among the blind the one-eyed blinkard reigns. 
So rules among the drowned he that drains; 
To make a bank was a great plot of state. 
Invent a shovel, and be a magistrate." 

There, in a few lines, is the whole story of reclama- 
tion and defence, and it would be worth no writer's 
while to amplify so happy a satire by the plain prose 
of facts and figures. But the difficulty is to be per- 
suaded that it is literally true. Between common 
knowledge of the Dutchman's fight with the waters, 
and intelligent comprehension derived from the sight 
and study of the fight actually in progress, there is 
all the difference that exists between a platitude and a 
conviction. And, then, to visit Holland is not neces- 
sarily to be convinced ; even, it is not necessarily to 
see any marks of a struggle. The agencies emplo^^ed 
by other peoples against hostile elements are self-evi- 
dent. Though they cease to be active, they still leave 
patent to the eyes some testimony of the enterprises 
that have been attempted or performed. The arma- 



200 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

ments of the Dutch in their conflict with nature, on 
the contrary, are for the most part hidden under- 
ground, and neither fighting nor disabled do they catch 
the easy homage of the eye. Sometimes one is so 
fortunate as to see them in the course of construction 
or being placed in position, before the earth or the sea 
has covered them up, and with the sight, the whole 
problem of Holland is discovered. I remember my 
own delighted amazement a few years ago at Ymuiden 
in such a fortunate experience. The new locks on the 
North-Sea Canal were being built; they were nearly 
completed, but the channel connecting them with the 
harbour had not been cut to admit the water, and 
sluice-heads and lock walls and gates and channels 
stood there naked and apart among the dunes. It was 
a revelation. I had spent an hour previously beside 
the old locks : they are not so large as the new ones, 
but they have been dug out of the same sandhills and 
face the same ocean, and that was sufficient to stir the 
imagination to some understanding of the difficulties 
that had been overcome in them. But they left one 
almost indifferent; whereas before the marvel and 
beauty of construction in the new locks as yet uncov- 
ered by the water, there came to one in a flash the 
conviction of the skill and daring of Dutch engineer- 
ing. It is rarely, however, that such a happy opportu- 
nity presents itself, and, instead, we have to impose 
upon ourselves the study of facts and figures and the 
exertion of trying to realise them. In what follows 
about the battle with the waters in Holland, therefore. 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 201 

many details are insisted upon, but I would ask the 
reader's patience in considering them. They are nec- 
essary to an understanding of how the battle is fought, 
and they cannot but assist to a juster appreciation of 
the character of the nation who fight it. 



Since the Middle Ages, the Dutch have been re= 
claiming their country from these inner waters. There 
is a tradition, that as early as the beginning of the 
fifteenth century a hydraulic windmill was set up near 
Alkmaar. Early in the next, it is probable, impolder- 
ing was in general practice on a small scale. In 1600, 
we know, the 7ijpe, in the north of North-Holland, 
was drained. By 1625, the Purmer, the Wormer, the 
Beemster, the polders to the north of Amsterdam, 
which every stranger visits, as well as those to the 
east of Stavoren, and between Workum and Hinde- 
lopen, had come into existence. The Schermer fol- 
lowed soon after. In 1643, Adriansz Leeghwater 
published a scheme for draining seventeen thousand 
acres of that inland sea. Two hundred years later 
his dream was being realised by the aid of steam. 
Between 1833 and 1877, Holland had increased from 
8,768 square miles to 12,731 square miles. In that 
extension were included, besides the bed of the Haar- 
lem Lake, the Y-polders created by the drainage of 
the Y at the making of the North Sea Canal. Com- 



202 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

paratively, there remains little of value to be reclaimed 
in the interior, and the Dutch are turning wistful eyes 
upon the Zuider Zee. If they do not attempt to drain 
it, the reason will be that they do not think the enter- 
prise worth their while, and not because they are afraid 
to essay it. 

The Haarlemmer Meer, we have seen, was a monster 
that for three centuries swallowed land and villages 
and smaller lakes, growing ever greater and more 
ravenous, until in 1836 it almost devoured Leiden and 
Amsterdam themselves. Leeghwater's scheme in the 
seventeenth century contemplated the draining of 
seventeen thousand acres only, and by means of one 
hundred and sixty windmills. In the next two hun- 
dred years a full score of plans were put forward to get 
rid of the evil that every day was becoming greater. 
One of them, Baron van Lijnden's, proposed that 
steam should be used, and its author was at the head 
of the Commission which actually took in hand the 
work of draining by steam-mills, after the tempests 
of 1836, by which time, possibly, nothing but steam- 
power would have availed. The Meer, even in normal 
conditions, was now over forty-five thousand acres in 
extent, and the annual cost of keeping it within these 
bounds involved an expenditure that would have fur- 
nished forth a herring-fleet. The water to be drained 
was some eight hundred millions of tons at the start, 
with another hundred millions, or more, to come from 
rainfall and infiltration : all below the lowest possible 
point of outfall. To lift this body of water out of 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 203 

the country, and so empty it into the outer waters, — 
that was the undertaking. 

Except for the magnitude of the operations, how- 
ever, there was nothing unusual in the plan of work- 




^ 



On the North Sea. 
From a drawing by Philip Sadee. 



ing. A canal was dug encircHng the lake, and the 
excavated earth helped to build the encircling dike 
on the inner side. Earthen dams plugged up the in- 
lets. The monster was at least caged. Then engines 
w^ere planted at different points on the dike. In May 



204 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

1848 pumping began, and by July i, 1852, the lake 
was dry. Along the length and breadth of the newly- 
drained territory canals were dug, and the whole area 
was further divided into sections by smaller canals and 
ditches, and the sections were sold. Two years later 
they were fields of splendid colza, with the bees busy 
in the golden crop. 

That is the usual course of impoldering; but here 
it was carried out on a gigantic scale. Figures are 
an inadequate means of realising the undertaking, but 
with the help of figures one must be content. The 
encircling canal is nearly forty miles in length, and 
as wide as the Thames at Shepperton. It had not 
merely to receive the pumped-out water; the lake 
traffic had to be carried on by it as well. For making 
the dike, the earth from the canal was not sufficient, as 
the sand diggings at Bennebroek still show. Canal and 
dike together cost i^i6o,ooo. The area of water they 
enclosed was over seventy square miles. An English 
firm designed an engine ^apable of discharging one 
million tons of water in a little over twenty-five hours, 
and three such engines were built, and set to work 
upon the one thousand million tons. To build them in 
position, and to keep them running, cost an additional 
^^"200,000. One, the Leeghwater, — all three were 
named after famous Dutch hydraulic engineers, — 
was placed at the south-west corner, and pumped the 
waters into the Kager Meer. From there they were 
carried down the Warmonder Lee to the old canal 
from Leiden to Haarlem ; from this canal another 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 205 

joining the Old Rhine near Katwijk was dug to 
receive them, and in consequence of this influx of 
waters into it, the works constructed at Katwijk forty 
years earlier for lifting the river into the sea had to 
be made stronger. The Cruquius, again, was placed 
half-way up the west side of the Lake, on the Spaarne, 
which then flowed past Haarlem and fell into the Y 
at Spaarndam. Here was a natural exit for the water 
pumped by this engine. The third engine, the Lijnden, 
is at the north end. The water raised by it was led 
into the small Lutkemeer (impoldered since then), 
and from there into the encircling canal, which had 
an outfall into the Y near Halfweg. By these three 
engines the lake was drained in exactly four years. 

But they are still at work. Infiltration here, as in 
most Dutch meadows, is a constant danger; and the 
polder, too, is deeper at the centre than at the sides. 
Over such an area, the rainfall is considerable. So the 
engines have to raise some fifty-four million tons of 
water sixteen feet on the average, annually. The two 
main transverse canals are each eighty feet wide, while 
six of less width cross the breadth of the polder, and 
four the length. The land reclaimed in all is 41,675 
acres. One hundred and thirty miles of roads cross 
the polder, and the canals are spanned by sixty or 
seventy bridges. 

The total outlay on the work was about ^^^800,000, 
and it has been fully repaid. A foreign syndicate 
came forward with an ofl'er to buy the whole polder 
at the rate of i^io per acre. At the latest sale of re- 



2o6 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

claimed land of the same kind, previously, the average 
price realised was under £6 an acre, so that this offer 
seemed good ; but owing to certain conditions in the 
issue of the drainage loan, it was not accepted. A 
year after the draining of the Lake, there was a first 
sale of some two thousand acres, of which the City of 
Leiden claimed the ownership. Before the auction 
opened, a protest was lodged, on behalf of the city, 
against the sale, and purchasers were threatened with 
proceedings if they attempted to settle on their lands. 
The government checkmated this by a guarantee to 
all purchasers of undisturbed possession. The sale 
then went on, and the price reaHsed on the average 
was not £6, or £io, but £2/\. \6s. %d. per acre. 

A very much higher price, it is worth noticing, was 
obtained for the reclaimed lands in the Y polders 
which were drained in the construction of the North 
Sea Canal, — one of the engineering triumphs of the 
century. The 12,450 acres realised £Zo on the aver- 
age. Some of the ground, of course, was very near 
Amsterdam, and suitable for building upon, and it 
sold for as much as ^340 per acre. This brought up 
the total yield; still, i^ii2 per acre was paid in some 
cases for agricultural land. As has been said, the new 
polders generally have been bought at too great a 
price, and as a result agricultural enterprise is ham- 
pered by the high capital value. 

And yet the Dutch are dreaming dreams of still 
greater conquests. At NIeuwe Diep we take a fishing 
boat of Oudeschild and sail from the mainland to the 




X 5 



fe 



2o8 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

island of Texel. The strait, in which some naval 
cruisers are manoeuvring, was once the mouth of the 
Ysel; the half-crescent of islands — Texel, Vlieland, 
Terschelling, Ameland — was part of the mainland 
then, and the Zuider Zee did not exist. Some token 
of that is given by the sandbanks that show their 
bright tops in the cold sunlight on our left. To the 
right, and behind us, lies the island of Wieringen, like 
a row of enormous poles topping the water. Farther 
south, North-Holland shoots out a spur, a line of blue, 
into the mists of this wonderful sea. For the sweep 
of an arm, the horizon-line is the meeting of sky and 
water. Here it seems are boundaries of Nature's own 
delimitation, not to be revised. But the Dutchman 
does not think so. In his ambitious imagination the 
scene upon which we are looking takes another shapCo 
He sees a gigantic highway running from North-Hol- 
land to Wieringen, and from Wieringen again to the 
mainland of Friesland. The fishercraft have disap- 
peared from the sea within. Its bays are become rich 
pastures ; fields stretch from Wieringen to Medemblik, 
from Stavoren to Kampen, the bight of Hoorn is dry, 
and the south shore of the Zuider Zee is a straight dike 
from the Ysel to the Y. There is no longer a Zuider 
Zee, indeed, but only the inland lake of the waters of 
the Ysel, which discharge at the sluices at Wieringen ; 
and the dead cities have come to life again. 

That or something like it has been the dream of 
Dutch men for fifty years, now, — ever since the 
Haarlem Lake was drained. Still, they hesitate to 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 209 

try to realise it, chiefly because they are not certain 
that if the Zuider Zee were made dry, they should 
find a fertile bed like that of the Haarlemmer Meer or 
that of the Y. Convince them that they should, and 
no doubt they would start upon the drainage works 
to-morrow, with a light heart for all the obstacles 
between them and the reclaimed hectares. Yet the 
obstacles are enormous. Consider, for one : into the 
sea that it is proposed to impolder, there falls, at 
Kampen, the river Ysel. How will the waters it pours 
into the Zuider Zee be got rid of? Build a dam to 
Den Helder, and carry on it to the North Sea, as 
through a town's water-pipe, a river like the Medway? 
That has been seriously proposed. If the work is 
undertaken, however, it will be in all likelihood on 
the lines of the scheme presented in 1892 to the 
Government by the Zuider Zee Association, the en- 
gineer of which was Mr. Lely, now the Minister for 
Waterstaat. The Government submitted the plan to a 
Royal Commission, who reported upon it favourably; 
and it is on it that is based the ambitious scheme of 
the Hollanders as I have described it. Let us examine 
it more in detail. 

The island of Wieringen supplies the natural start- 
ing point for the works. Between North-Holland and 
Piaam in Friesland, from mainland to mainland across 
Wieringen, is some thirty or thirty-five miles ; and 
right along the twenty-five miles of this distance 
between the island and Friesland is to run an embank- 

14 



2IO HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

ment, with a height of seventeen feet eight inches on 
the average above sea-level at Amsterdam, and a 
breadth at sea-level of two hundred and sixteen feet. 
The actual summit of the dike will be between six and 
seven feet broad; but a little lower, on the inner, or 
Zuider Zee side, a level stretch of fifty-five feet nine 
inches in width will carry a railroad, and the ordinary 
trafhc. It is estimated that the building of this em- 
bankment, which is to be begun at Wieringen and the 
mainland of Friesland simultaneously, will take ten 
years. Between Wieringen and the North-Holland 
mainland is the Amsteldiep. This will be closed. 
At Wieringen are to be constructed two sets of locks. 
To keep out an enemy's ships, the locks will be small : 
one, three hundred and twenty feet by thirty-three feet, 
the other, for fishing boats, one hundred and thirty- 
one feet by twenty feet. These finished, impoldering 
may be begun. 

In the centre of the Zuider Zee will be left a large 
lake, the Ysel Meer, as a storehouse for the waters of 
the Ysel. The northernmost polder will consist of some 
thirty thousand acres, enclosed by the dam of the 
Amsteldiep and a dike sweeping round from Wieringen 
to Medemblik. On the Friesland side, a dike from 
about Stavoren to near the north bank of the Ysel- 
mouth at Kampen will shut in two hundred square 
miles ; while a third widely encircling the Golden Sea 
will add a hundred square miles to North-Holland. 
Finally, nearly four hundred square miles will be re- 
claimed from the south bight between Amsterdam and 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 211 

the Ysel. In all, a Province as large as Zeeland will 
be added to Holland ; reclaimed and kept drained in 
exactly the same way as all polders are reclaimed and 
drained. The dikes will keep out the Ysel Meer, and 
the inside waters will be raised step by step till they 
can be poured into the outer waters. If the works 
were to be begun now, the eight hundred square miles 
might all be under the plough by the middle of the 
twentieth century, — scarcely before; but as actual 
reclamation can be carried on from the start, long ere 
then some portions of the bed of the Zuider Zee would 
be yellow with colza. At least thirty million pounds 
will have to be spent on the transformation. We were 
right in saying that the Hollander takes long views. 

All this may help us to realise the magnitude of 
the work of reclamation in great and notable polders 
like those of the Haarlemmer Meer and the Y-basin: 
of reclamation in the first instance, and of keeping 
them dry from hour to hour and from day to day ever 
afterwards. But the drainage of the largest polder is 
not to be considered by itself; it affects the drainage 
of the whole country. A polder is any basin made dry, 
and the greatest polder of all is the whole Lowlands of 
Holland. They lie below the level of the outer waters ; 
they were a swamp, if not a sea; and just as the small- 
est polder, once drained, has to be kept drained, so the 
whole of the Lowlands, reclaimed from the waters, are 
kept reclaimed only by continual and strenuous labour. 
Thus the drainage of the country is one system, in 
which the smallest polder equally with the largest has 
its definite place and interest: proof once more that 



2 12 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

the safety of Holland may be a question merely of 
half an inch of water. 

Besides the works of reclamation within the country, 
the greatest of which, finished or in contemplation, 
have just been described, there is going on constantly, 
on the broken fringes of Groningen and Friesland, and 
of the islands of Zeeland, a system of impoldering from 
the sea. The conjoint action of Nature and of man 
in these sea-polders is this : The ocean leaves against 
the dike-faces, rapidly at first, nlore slowly as the 
deposit mounts higher, layer upon layer of clay that 
at last keeps a dry head above the waters save at 
high-tide. This wet, sea-washed clay is known as 
slikken^ and is deposited chiefly in the months when 
the wind is off the land, and the jabble of the tides 
consequently less : these months are known locally as 
slik-maanden (^///^-months). Once lifted above the 
ordinary sea-level, the slikken become covered with 
growth, first with sea-coral, and afterwards with sea- 
grasses, and are then known as kwelders. Upon the 
kwelders agriculture is not possible, for the high-tides 
still overrun them; but sheep and cattle are put upon 
them to graze. At length, when the soil has mounted 
suf^ciently high to seem to justify impoldering, they 
are encircled by dikes, after the system we have seen 
followed in all polders, and the work of reclamation 
goes on apace. Such is the process at work con- 
stantly all along the broken coasts of Holland. Stand- 
ing upon any of the sea-dikes there at ebb-tide, we 
observe towards the sea, first the grass-grown kwelders^ 
then the kwelders covered with sea-kail, farthest out of 



THE FIGHT WITH THE Wx\TERS 213 

all the brown slimy slikken left exposed by the falling 
waters. If we look inland, there, as likely as not, is 
an inner-dike, perhaps another dike within that again, 
once the defence against the sea, but now high and 
dry amid the reclaimed fields. I cannot give a better 
idea of the practical work of sea-impoldering always 
proceeding on these coasts than by quoting from the 




The Bridge in the Meadow. 
From a drawing by Stortenbeker. 

Rotterdamsche Courant of one day in April last, the 
following from its correspondent in Hunsingoo, in 
the extreme North of Groningen. 

"The Province of Groningen grows continually in the 
North. The sea is busy day after day, and the progress it 
makes in a short time is astonishing. The farmers have dug 
ditches, running from south to north, with little straw-covered 
mounds on their side that bear the name of ' dogs.' These 
* dogs ' and ditches are real mud catchers, and their cost in 



214 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

wages to the farmer is soon repaid. The formation of the 
soil spreads from the west to the east. Behind Pieterburen 
and Westernieland it goes on rapidly. Fifteen or twenty 
years ago there was a decrease of land noticeable behind 
the Andel ; but now there is an increase again, and behind 
Usquert, and especially behind Warfum, the new soil is 
plainly to be seen. The North polder, stretchmg from 
Westernieland to Usquert, was diked in, in the year 1811, 
and now the sea can be seen forming a new polder. When 
it will be diked in, is uncertain ; so soon, at any rate, as the 
farmers see that impoldering will repay them. The outer 
fringes of the Province, the kwelders, are of great importance 
as meadow land. Horses and cattle are put upon them ; 
but above all sheep, the rearing of which, as it happens, is a 
profitable business in the country just at present. The great 
drawback to the kwelders is, of course, that when the north- 
west wind blows, they are flooded, and for days are useless. 
To mitigate this, the farmers have had some forty hectares 
behind Westernieland and Pieterburen surrounded by a 
summer-dike of a few metres in height, with conduits so 
constructed below them that the water can flow out of them, 
but cannot enter. This dike, however, suffered greatly by 
the storms of February. i\ few day-labourers contracted to 
restore it, but their work did not satisfy the farmers, who 
stopped it accordingly, and took the repairs in hand them- 
selves under the direction of a surveyor. These small indik- 
ings are forerunners of the greater ones." 

So much, by way of popular description, for the 
polders and the drainage works of the WaterstaaL It 
is necessary to say a word about the dikes. The 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 215 

reader is now acquainted with the river-dike at Mau- 
rik that protects the orchards of the Betuwe from the 
irruptions of the Rhine. It is faced with a layer of 
fascines, and covered, save on the roadway, by a coat 
of green turf. At dangerous spots it is strengthened 
by basalt, and it is supported in places by piles. It 
is a good example of an important river-dike. Later 
on, at Helder and at Domburg, we shall visit the still 
greater bulwarks of Holland against the ocean. Giant 
dikes like these stand upon immense rafts of earth and 
stones sunk one upon another in the water; they are 
girded with granite, and tower above the ocean whose 
thundering tides are broken against their basalt greaves. 
We can learn, if we wish, all about their height and 
weight and cost. Here, we have to remember chiefly 
that it is only on account of their magnitude that they 
are to be considered by themselves ; that the simplest 
mound round a polder belongs to the same system as 
the West Capelle, which has cost in upkeep its own 
weight in copper. 

II 

The whole of the low-lying area of Holland whicl. 
requires protection from the outer waters is divided 
up into sections of varying extent. In some cases 
the boundaries of these sections correspond with the 
boundaries of the Communes. In almost all they are 
fixed in view of the parity of interests concerned 
in the defence against the water. Each of them Is 



2i6 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

known as a waterschap, and the legislation for these 
waterschappen and the administration of their affairs is 
of the highest interest and importance. But before 
they can be properly understood, it is necessary to 
realise clearly how closely the waterschappen are linked 
in a common system. The simple polder is sur- 
rounded by a dike that keeps the outside waters from 
entering it, and makes it possible to regulate the level 
of the waters within. The superfluous inside waters 
are pumped out of it into a lake, river, canal, or other 
convenient basin ; and several such storage basins at 
the same water-level encircled by dikes and dams make 
what is known as a boezem. But the same water some- 
times belongs to more than one boezem; in which 
case, of course, it is divided into sections by dartis and 
sluices, and each section is kept at the water-level of 
the boezem to which it belongs. Take the Oiide Rijuy 
for example. That branch of the Rhine, having 
parted with the Vecht at Utrecht, crawled on to Leiden 
and so to the North Sea at Katwijk. Centuries ago, 
however, it had become so decrepid that it had to stop 
far short of its destination at the coast; it sat down, 
as it were, in the middle of the Rhineland, and for 
some hundreds of years was an object of contempt 
and a nuisance to the whole country side. At length 
imder the direction of Louis Napoleon, early in this 
century, it was helped on to its feet again, and given 
a new set of crutches, and so partly lifted, partly 
shoved, into the sea at Katwijk. The figure of beg- 
garly decrepitude will not avail further; and it may 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 217 

as well be said that it is not a trae figure according to 
everyone's reading of the evidence. Floods and drain- 
age-works, the forces of Nature and the contrivances 
of men, have within historical times completely altered 
the course and branches of the Rhine after its entry 
into Holland : that is undoubted ; but precisely the 
changes that have been made are matters of dispute. 
Especially, the course of the Old Rhine, and whether 
(as my figure assumed) it ever had a mouth at Kat- 
wijk, are interesting and debateable questions. Here 
it is sufficient to understand that what has happened 
to this Old Rhine is that it has ceased to be a river, 
practically, and is cut up into a series of basins, with 
dams and sluices, at varying water-levels. So it is 
wnth other waters ; they are subdivided into reservoirs. 
Lakes, where they exist, perform the same service. 
Now these boezems, again, communicate with the outer 
waters, or, if these are at a very much higher level, 
with higher hoezems ; so that, by a succession of steps, 
the superfluous waters of the lowest polders are brought 
to the outer waters at last. Finally, the country is pro- 
tected from these outer waters by dikes, smaller or 
greater according to the volume and force of the outer 
waters, largest of all, of course, where the outer water 
is the driving ocean tides, at Den Helder or at West 
Capelle. 

It is now clear why the Waterstaat is so great and 
so characteristic a part of the government of Holland. 
From very early times it has been recognised as an 



2i8 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

institution of the highest importance, requiring a sep- 
arate administrative system. By the end of the Eighty 
Years' War, the country was broken up into water- 
schappen : an old house in Delft still exists as a memo- 
rial of the Dike Counts and their assessors of the 
Rhineland. Nowadays, each waterschap is governed 
by heemraden, who are elected by the proprietors of 
land within it. A hectare entitles to one vote, but no 
proprietor may exercise more votes than a fourth of 
the hectares in the waterschap. The heemraden con- 
duct the business of the district from day to day, the 
matters of greater importance being dealt with by the 
proprietors iingelanderi) in council, or, in waterschappen 
of large extent, by their representatives {hoof d-inge Ian- 
den). The President of the heemraden^ in the smaller 
districts, is nominated by the Standing Committee of 
the Provincial-States ; in the larger, by the Sovereign. 
The body has the power to levy the money required 
for the upkeep of works and for the general adminis- 
tration, and for making police regulations for the use 
and protection of the works, and for enforcing penal 
statutes. 

From what we have seen of the system of draining, 
however, it will be evident that many of these sections 
of country form part of more than one waterschap. 
Thus a polder, or small waterschap, has its own admin- 
istration, with its mills and canals, levying its own 
taxes ; it pumps the water into canals, or other stor- 
age reservoirs, com.mon to other polders, under the 
administration of a great waterschap, which levies rates 




o 

H 

in 

w 

K 
H 






s 

p 



220 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

against the upkeep of engines and sluices for carry- 
ing the waters to river or sea; while over all there 
is a heemraadschap, levying for its dikes against sea 
and river. 

The powers given to these dike and polder govern- 
ing bodies are very great. They are not confined to 
those of taxation and police regulation already referred 
to. Certain heemraadschappen have, by ancient usage, 
the right of digging out of the uiterwaarden the clay 
that is necessary for the building of the dikes. They 
can use the clay, that is to say, the best of the land, 
when they find it on the nearest spot and can take it 
with the least damage {te naaster lage en minster schade). 
This really is an ancient burden on all the uiterwaarden^ 
dating from a time when the ground outside the dikes 
was of little worth. Now the value of these outer 
meadows is very great, and still the proprietor is 
indemnified for a small part only of his loss; although 
it seems likely that before long full compensation will 
be allowed. There are few things, indeed, that the 
governing bodies may not do, if the doing of it seems 
necessary for protection from the waters. The country 
threatened by flood is in a state of siege. The dike 
governor issues his orders and they must be obeyed. 
In Holland, no one can be dispossessed of property 
without a special act declaring the expropriation to be 
for the common weal and without the previous pay- 
ment or the assurance of indemnity; but the Consti- 
tution of which that is an article expressly excepts 
cases of war, fire, and watersnood, and watersnood com- 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 221 

prises not only broken dikes and actual inundations 
but the imminence of these as well. Then, the 
government of the dike or the polder can take posses- 
sion of anything, and can occupy any place, as they 
think fit. They can call for any service they require. 
When the dike is threatened by a flood, it is protected 
by osiers placed upon its face. If the waters appear 
likely to mount over the dike, then the dike-slopes are 
temporarily heightened by planks, and the space on 
the top between the planks is filled up with anything 
that comes to hand. The polder-proprietors have to 
supply labourers as ii\ feudal days proprietors supplied 
soldiers ; but others iway be impressed for the work. 
Carts, wagons, wood, brick, manure, anything in fact 
that can be useful, may be appropriated without by- 
your-leave or more than the understanding that the 
value will be refunded. Houses can be demolished to 
supply stop-gap materials ; houses have been demol- 
ished thus by dijk-graven who still live to recount the 
urgency of the danger that required measures so 
heroic. 

Something of the same necessary arbitrariness is to 
be seen in what is known as the normaliseeren of 
the rivers. Let me take by way of illustration our old 
friend the Lek, of whose turbulent doings the innkeeper 
and his wife at Maurik have told us. I have been 
fortunate in getting hold of a sectional plan of the 
scheme for normalising that river some thirty years 
ago, and from a description of it possibly the reader 
will be able to gain a clear idea of the process. The 



222 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

section represents about three-quarters of a mile of 
the river considerably below Vianan. At this point, 
the distance between the great North and South dikes 
varies from about 190 yards to 450 yards. In winter 
floods, the water stretched from dike to dike. Nearer 
the channel are shown the smaller summer dikes that 
confine the river in summer, leaving the lands between 
the summer and winter dikes — the uiterwaarden — 
smiling to the sun as the reader saw them in his first ex- 
cursion into the Betuwe. Such was the varying bed of 
the Lek at this point. It has to be noticed that along 
the course of the summer dikes there are thrown out 
into the stream piers and jetties, — kT'ibben\hQ Dutch call 
them because they " crib " and confi.ne the soil deposited 
by the river. Even the bed between the summer dikes 
varies greatly in extent ; and thus the ordinary current 
of the river is irregular, — fast in the narrower parts 
and slow in the wider. In the wider, a large amount 
of sand is deposited, and the current is diminished still 
more. When kribbcn are constructed, however, the 
bed becomes narrower, and the current, digging out 
this narrow bed, deposits the sand between the kribben. 
After the space between them is filled up with the 
sand, a layer of clay forms upon it, grass begins to 
spring up,, and thus new land is added to the idter- 
waarden. A glance at the chart, however, shows that 
the kribben are of two kinds. Some run out at an 
angle, with the current, while others stand up to the 
current boldly. The first are not part of the scheme 
of normalising. They have been made by the pro- 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 223 

prietors with a view to enclosure, and are condemned 
as being unscientific in principle. It is no longer 
allowable to construct them. All the kribben that are 
built now are of the other kind and run boldly out into 
the water. As has been explained, they are designed 
to bring the river into a normal channel lying between 
the two normalising lines that we see indicated in the 
chart as running parallel to each other and touching 
the outjutting kribben on each bank. The river flows 
in this deepened channel, the evils of flood are mitigated, 
and it is found that the ice melts quickly in these deep 
waters in the centre of the stream, and that the danger 
of an ijsgang is lessened. That is the principle of 
normalising the rivers, which the observant traveller 
can see traces of in his railway journey over the Maas, 
the Waal, the Lek, between 's Hertogenbosch and 
Utrecht, or indeed at almost any point where the train 
crosses a river. The arbitrariness with which it is 
applied is made plain in the chart. The normalising 
lines are shown running through the tdterwaarden, and 
for the portions of land on the river side of these lines, 
which are broken away by the current, the proprietor 
gets small compensation. In the last revision of the 
Constitution, in 1887, an article was inserted which 
seemed to hold out to the proprietor a promise of full 
indemnification against loss sustained in this manner. 
But as yet it has not been fulfilled. He is no longer 
allowed to build kribben and enclose at his discretion, 
and he has no claim upon the ground enclosed by the 
approved kribben unless he incurs the cost of construct- 



224 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

ing these. If, as generally happens, he declines that 
undertaking, the State builds them and becomes the 
possessor of the new uiterwaarden. 

Now it is in connection with this whole system of 
drainage, for protection and reclamation, that the 
Provincial-States play so important a part. All their 
other duties, as has been shown, are purety administra- 
tive, but the legislative powers placed in their hands in 
this exceptional case are very great indeed. They can 
form, unite, separate, the various waterschappen ; they 
lay down the laws of their constitution ; and the 
Standing Committee i^Ge depute erde Staten) have the 
permanent control of their administration. 

It is evident that when there are so many bodies, all 
interdependent in view of a common danger, yet each 
of them representing separate interests, there must be 
frequent cases of diversity of opinion, of cross-pur- 
poses, and even of competitive action, calling for the 
exercise of this power of the Provincial States. An 
action at law recently before the Dutch courts admi- 
rably illustrates this clashing of interests. It con- 
cerned the dikes upon the Lek, of which so much 
-has been said already. The North dike, which pro- 
tects a tract of country stretching to the gates of 
Amsterdam itself, had always been higher than the 
South dike, that guards the Betuwe. It ought to be 
explained that neither dike really was as high as it 
ought to have been, else the relative measurements 
would not have mattered. As it was, the lower height 
of the South dike gave the country to the north com- 




The Mill. 
From a drawin.-; by Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch. 



226 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

parative immunity, and in that selfish assurance the 
heemraadscJiap in the north were lulled into inaction. 
The direction of the South dike, however, was in very 
energetic hands, and one bad morning, when there were 
threats of inundation to rouse them, the north body 
wakened up to discover that the opposite dike was 
higher than their own. Immediately the cry was 
raised that Holland proper was in danger. A higher 
dike in the north was customary, and the customary, 
the heemraadscJiap contended, had passed into the 
right. They threw the onus of the present danger 
upon the shoulders of the heemraadschap in the south, 
and of the government that had permitted them to 
heighten their dike. But the southern heemraadschap 
had a spirited answer. It was, they said, opposed to 
the root principle of the defence system to put limits 
to the energy and foresight with which a dike control 
protected a country under their guardianship, and they 
suggested that it was for the Provincial-States to step 
in and order a corresponding heightening of the dike 
on the north. This was exactly the course the Pro- 
vincial States took ; they gave instructions that the 
North dike was to be raised half a metre. 

In the meantime, however, the heemraadschap on the 
north side had come to the conclusion that their dike 
must be heightened, and they had enlisted the assist- 
ance of the heemraadschappen of the districts in North- 
and South-Holland, which the danger threatened, in a 
scheme for raising it a metre. So the instructions of 
the Provincial-States were met by the request of the 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 227 

heemraadschap to be allowed to make the half-metre 
a metre, and ultimately this was granted. And now 
arose the interesting questions that in time came be- 
fore the courts for decision. For the addition to the 
dike, earth had to be abstracted from the idterwaarden: 
were the proprietors to be indemnified against its loss? 
Then there was a difficulty about compensation for 
the trees upon the dike. It was contended by the 
heemraadschap that they ought not to have been there. 
The old practice of planting the Dutch dikes, with the 
idea of strengthening them thereby, had been con- 
demned, and an order issued by government against 
the trees. The proprietors, however, chose to assume 
that in the absence of direct instructions the old trees 
upon a dike might be allowed to remain, and, remain- 
ing, they were on the Lek dike now to give rise to this 
litigation. Lastly, a change in the height of the dike 
involved a corresponding change in its slopes, and the 
consequent occupation of fresh land within the dike as 
well as without it; and here again was a ticklish point 
of indemnity to be settled. On all counts, I believe, 
the heemraadschap won the day, but that does not 
specially concern us. The whole history of the case 
is instructive as showing the nature of the questions 
that come before the Provincial-States for settlement. 



228 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 



III 

I MUST invite the patience of the reader a Httle fur- 
ther, while I mention another set of engineering works 
that exhibit the Hollanders' fight with the waters. In 
writing of the great waterways of Holland, it will still 
be necessary to employ figures, which for many are a 
distraction rather than a help ; but not so largely as in 
the case of those undertakings already described, the 
machinery of which is almost entirely hidden out of 
sight. Unlike the drainage works, the Dutch water- 
ways have something to say for themselves. One 
might be standing in the middle of the Haarlemmer 
Meer, and have no reason to suspect that he was in a 
polder, or that he found a footing there only because, 
somewhere or other, enormous pumps were busy dis- 
charging thousands of tons of water from it. But it is 
impossible to sail along the North-Holland Canal or 
the North-Sea Canal without realising some of the 
labour involved in its construction and upkeep. 

The canals of Holland are innumerable. Broad 
and narrow, they flaunt like ribbons through the land. 
Here they are little dividing ditches, there the singels 
round the towns, again they are connecting chains 
between the great rivers. Sometimes, constructed for 
drainage, they become highways of traffic ; at other 
times, they have been constructed as highways of 
traffic, and are absorbed into the drainage system. 
Their involutions are bewildering. Between canals 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 229 

close-linked and canals flying loose ends, rivers canal- 
ised, rivers dammed, rivers given new mouths or lifted 
out to sea, we are befogged. He is not setting himself 
an easy task who would demonstrate how it is that 
the so-called Maas which flows past Rotterdam is in 
reality the Lek, and that not a drop of water from the 
Maas sources in the Ardennes falls into the sea by 
the Maas mouth at The Hook. As we go round Hol- 
land, we shall strike the main lines of the canal system, 
and be able possibly to clear up some of these mys- 
teries. For our^ present purpose, it is sufficient to 
visit the two great waterways from Amsterdam to the 
sea. 

These waterways are the outcome of the needs of 
Amsterdam as a city of commerce. In earlier days, 
and in earlier conditions of trading, she did not require 
them. Without any outlet to the ocean save the 
impracticable channel of the Zuider Zee (which is 
choked at the city mouth by the great sandbank, the 
Pampus, and is strait and dangerous at the other end 
where it cuts off Texel from the mainland), she was 
in a state of splendid isolation that favoured, rather 
than retarded, her commercial superiority. Some- 
times the merchant ships came as far as the Pampus, 
whence their cargoes were carried to her in the scheeps 
kameelen^ or ships camels, lighters specially constructed 
for that traffic; others, too large for the shallows of 
the Zuider Zee, lightened at Den Helder. The day 
arrived at length, however, when the necessity of an 
outlet to the sea became imperative if the capital was 



230 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

to hold her own, and in 1819 was begun, and five years 
later was finished, the North-Holland Canal, with an 
exit at Nieuwe Diep. 

It is interesting to notice that as far back as the mid- 
dle of the seventeenth century, one Jan Pieterzoon Don 
had prepared plans for a canal across North-Holland at 
its narrowest part where the North-Sea Canal now Hes : 
though it ought to be observed that his object was 
not so much to provide communication with the ocean 
as to get rid of the inland sea of water which robbed 
the country of thousands of acres and threatened to 
rob it at any moment of many thousands more. A 
hundred years later, an engineer of the Waterstaat 
revived the project, and in the second decade of this 
century William L strongly advocated it. But in 1820 
the country was no more ready for the undertaking 
than when Don planned it in 1634, and the canal that 
was determined upon was the North-Holland Canal 
issuing on the sea at Den Helder. 

Even now, perhaps, that is the Dutch canal best 
known by the visitor to Holland. De Amicis says 
that it is nearly fifty miles in length and forty-three 
yards in breadth, and estimates its cost at ;£"i, 250,000; 
and he speaks of it as one of the most wonderful works 
of the nineteenth century. Most of the notable descrip- 
tions of Holland, like that of De Amicis, have been 
written before the completion of the rival canal to 
Ymuiden : and, indeed, the winding course of the older 
waterway, by innumerable locks and under innumer- 
able bridges, past Zaandam and Alkmaar, quaint and 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 231 



characteristic, and other show places, out to the sea 
at Nieuwe Diep, gives it a picturesqueness at least that 













North Sea Fishermen. 
From a drawing by Elchanon Verveer. 



cannot be claimed for the shorter, straighter, more 
business-like canal to Ymuiden. 

For some fifty years this North-Holland canal was 
the only waterway for Amsterdam ships to the sea. 
But the locks at Den Helder, crowded and unrivalled 



232 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

thirty years ago, stand deserted now, eclipsed by the 
great works at Ymuiden. In one forenoon, last spring, 
when we sat beside them, delighting in the never- 
ending movement and play of colour in the wharves at 
the Willemsoord, one vessel only, a small gunpowder 
boat for the forts, passed through the gates. The 
North-Holland Canal, with its tortuous course and 
many locks and bridges, has outlived its usefulness ; 
the very qualities that give it picturesqueness have 
made it unserviceable. It happened often that the 
great ocean ships were sighted from the heights at 
Velzerend days before they could enter at Den Hel- 
der; not infrequently, in tempestuous winters, weeks, 
months even, passed before they reached Amsterdam. 
So in 1865 the Prince of Orange put the first spade 
in the sand at Ymuiden, where (as has been seen) it 
had been proposed to put it half a century earlier. 
The North- Holland Canal was dead, the North-Sea 
Canal was coming into existence. 

The Haarlemmer Meer had been drained ; but there 
still remained the gulf of the Zuider Zee known as the 
Y. It stretched south to Halfweg (on the present 
railway route from Amsterdam to Haarlem), and on 
the north to near Zaandam, and westwards almost to 
Beverwijk at the foot of the North Sea dunes. To- 
day it is a polder : save for the canal and its branches, 
a stretch of fertile green. The inland sea has been 
drained ; a canal has been run through it from Amster- 
dam to the coast at Ymuiden ; and the reclaimed land 
of the Y-polders has been sold and has been occupied 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 233 

as we have already heard. All 's well that ends well. 
But that was an undertaking entered upon, and little 
wonder, with hesitation, and with opposition even. 
Timid citizens of Amsterdam, as they well might be, 
were fearful for their city and their province. Con- 
sider: to give exit to the canal, the dunes had to be 
cut; the natural defences of the country were to be 
deliberately broken down, and that at a point where 
the North-Sea comes thundering upon them. More- 
over, many interests were concerned, many interests 
clashed ; and the cost was in proportion to the dan- 
ger. In the end, however, all obstacles were overcome. 
For twenty years, now, the great ships have been pass- 
ing to Amsterdam through that impoldered stretch. 

As a picturesque route, as has been said, the North- 
Sea Canal cannot compare with the other which mean- 
ders through North-Holland northwards to Nieuwe 
Diep. Its great points of interest are its locks. 
Those at the throat of the Zuider Zee, at Schelling- 
woude, over against Amsterdam, are three in number, 
conjointly named the Oranjesluizen, after the late 
Prince of Orange. At the same time as the Oranje- 
sluizen, two locks were constructed' at the North-Sea 
end of the Canal, at Ymuiden ; but after a time they 
were found to be too small, and w^ork was begun upon 
other locks of greatly larger dimensions which were 
finished and opened for traffic in 1897. ^ will ask the 
reader to join me in a visit, already referred to, which 
I paid to these locks in the summer of 1896. 

Instead of making the railway journey all the way to 



234 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 



Ymuiden, we alight at Velen junction, and walk. By 
doing so, we come gradually and with better under- 
standing upon the main works : First, a mushroom 

hamlet, not Dutch in 
:' ' character, but sprung 

out of the needs of 
I ; ^ the enterprise, and in 

1 its squalor and ne- 

glect, and curiously 
enough in its back- 
ground setting also, 
reminding us of a 
familiar mining vil- 
lage in the east of 
Scotland. For the 
next few hundred 
yards, however, we 
are in Holland : the 
road is of klinkers ; 
peasants in Dutch 
costume pass along 
it, and over the flat 
landscape to the 
right appear, now 
and then, a mast, a 
sail, a column of 
moving smoke, — indications of a canal. Suddenly, 
at a bend of the road, the melting morning mists 
discover, pale but bright, the village of Ymuiden, 
with two tall lighthouses rising apparently from its 




In the Docks, Amsterdam. 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 235 

midst, and, beyond, the sea. On our right, as we walk 
along, are the works themselves,^ the branch canal to 
the new lock, dredgers vomiting forth yellow water at 
the tail of the bank, endless chains of buckets, cranes, 
sheds, lighters, steamers, groups of navvies ; and all 
the while, on the main canal nearer us, the everyday 
traffic, and cutters and fishing-smacks skipping across 
the harbour beyond the locks. For a hundred yards 
or so the road becomes the main street of Ymuiden, 
and by a sharp turn at the farther end leads on to the 
quay. A Grimsby smack or two lie beside it, unload- 
ing for the auction proceeding, in Dutch fashion, close 
by. After a time spent in watching some vessels 
entering the old locks, we cross the canal to visit the 
new works. A courteous native of whom we make 
inquiries about them is eager to impart all the informa- 
tion he possesses, and insists upon being our guide. 
He is a fish-buyer or a ship's-chandler, a plain citizen 
at any rate, but in these last five years plain citizens 
of Ymuiden have become as voluble about hydrome- 
chanics as an engineer of the Waterstaat. So we are 
piped on our way to the new locks to the tune of 
marvellous dimensions. From here to the East-dock 
locks at Amsterdam, it seems, is a distance of fifteen 
miles and a half Throughout that length, the canal 
has an ordinary water-level of i ft. 7 in., and a depth 
of 27 ft., below A. P., a bottom width of nearly thirty 
yards, and a width at water-level varying from sixty to 
a hundred and twenty yards. Then come figures to 
prove the superiority of the new locks over all the 



236 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

other locks in Holland, and from them I extract this 
comparative table, which contains all the information 
on the point that a reasonable man can desire : — 





Length 


Width 


Depth below 




in feet. 


in feet. 


A. P. in feet. 


Main lock at Schellingwoude 


315 


59 


14 


Old Main lock at Ymuiden 


394 


59 


25 


New lock at Ymuiden 


735 


82 


33 



Our guide follows up his figures with a boast. 
" The biggest steamer in Holland will be able to 
enter Amsterdam now," he declares, and I have a rea- 
son of my own for believing it. A Rotterdam man had 
been telling me of a large new steamer that was sail- 
ing out of the Maas, — the largest vessel in the Dutch 
fleet. '' Will it be able to sail from Amsterdam when 
the new North-Sea locks are opened, do you think?" 
I asked him. " That," he replied, looking very grave, 
" is a doubtful question ; " whereby I was convinced 
that the largest vessel in the Dutch fleet cou/d sail 
from Amsterdam. A Rotterdammer does not give 
Amsterdam the benefit of a doubt. 

But now there is no more need of the paeans of our 
guide, for we have crossed the island between the two 
channels, and can see for ourselves the new lock and 
all the marvel of its construction. It lies farther inland 
than the old locks, and about seventy yards" from the 
old channel. That was as near as they could venture 
to bring it, in view of the dangers of ground water. 
The canal branches off to it at a point about a third of 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 2^^ 

a mile to the eastwards, and on the sea-ward side a 
channel has been dug to connect the harbour and the 
lock some three hundred yards below the old sea- 
gates. Water lies in the branch canal up to the inner 
sluice-head ; but the trough of the connecting channel 
is nearly dry, for the natural dam between it and the 
harbour will not be cut until all the other operations 
are finished. How shall I describe the lock itself, — 
or rather the locks, for though there is only one open- 
ing, there are two pits, a shorter and a longer, so that 
in the passage of smaller vessels as little sea-water as 
possible may enter the canal? Imagine the Strand, a 
greatly widened Strand it must be, from Waterloo 
Bridge to the Adelphi, lined with unbroken walls of 
solid, beautifully-finished masonry where now are 
houses, and with gigantic gates at either end and 
somewhere about Southampton Street between. Im- 
agine further that the level of the house-tops is the 
level of the surrounding country, and that you are 
standing there on the edge of the walls, and looking 
down into the Strand. You will then have some idea 
of the appearance of the locks before the water had 
been admitted. Unfortunately, however, there is a little 
water in the locks covering the floors, and so even we 
at Ymuiden have to exercise our imaginations if we are 
to understand all the wonders of their construction. 
With our guide at our elbow and the Strand fancy in 
mind, however, it may not be difficult to realise some 
of them. 

First of all, the pit in which the locks are situate 



238 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

had to be excavated, and I do not know that we get 
any clearer idea of the labour which that involved 
when we have learned that fifty million cubic feet of 
sand were removed. There are other figures rather 
more informing. The original design was to make the 
thresholds of a depth of a little over twenty-seven feet, 
nine inches below A. P. Later they were planned 
for three feet deeper, and ultimately were brought to 
thirty-two feet, nine inches below A. P. But this last 
addition of two feet cost close upon ;^30,000, and be- 
fore it was sanctioned by Ministers, it had become '' a 
great plot of State." The reader may be spared the 
consideration of the results of borings, experiments 
with ground water, and calculations as to the rise 
and fall of the tides, that determined the manner of 
constructing the thresholds. The pit kept dry, drier 
than had been expected, and the subsoil was firm. 
The chief concern, it seemed, was to offer a sufficient 
resistance to the high water outside the gates in its 
efforts to force a way within. To accomplish this, a 
floor, eight feet thick, had to be laid of beton, a rough 
concrete composed of brick, sand, slacked lime and 
tufa. To receive this beton, a framework — a wooden 
tub as it were — was sunk round the bottom of the 
pit. It was fashioned of planks, a foot wide and eight 
inches thick, and no less than twenty-six feet long. 
This great length was necessary because, from the fear 
of water when they dug deeper, the engineers sunk the 
planks when the bottom of the pit was only twenty-six 
feet deep, and they had to allow them a hold sufficient 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 239 

to resist the outside pressure when the pit had been 
further excavated to thirty-two or thirty-three feet. 
It can easily be understood that to drive home this 
framework was enormous labour. To overcome the 
great resistance at this depth, pipes through which 
water was pressed were inserted on each side of the 
plank, so as to loosen the sand before it in its way 
down under the blows of the rammer. Moreover, 
since the framework had to be nearly as watertight 
as it could be made, the planks were not merely 
driven into the soil, but were deeply grooved into 
one another. It gives us some idea of the quantity 
of materials used in this frame, when we learn that 
the grooving of the planks necessitated an additional 
fourteen thousand cubic feet of wood, and increased 
the cost by ^1,000. Nearly nine hundred thousand 
cubic feet of beton were swallowed up, and the cost 
of floor and frame together was ;^50,ooo. 

We have had more than enough of figures, else we 
might go step by step through the different stages 
of construction, and learn exactly how, and at what a 
cost, Holland's enemy was circumvented and subdued. 
There was a critical moment in the fight, when the 
■ water rushed from below through an old boring in one 
of the sluice-heads, burst, and scattered aside the beton 
floor, and seemed to be about to demolish triumphantly 
the work and skill of years. It is an interesting story 
by what means, now hidden from sight, that assault 
was met, but we will not tell it. There is no need of 
hidden proofs of the ingenuity and daring of the 



240 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 



engineers. The lock itself, just so much as we can 
see of it, without any explanations of guides or blue- 
books, proclaims their triumph loudly enough. 

So we bid farewell to our guide and his miles of 
bewildering measurements still unrecited, and are 

ferried across the 
fisher-harbour to the 
light-houses. After a 
blowy walk along 
one of the piers, 
which the harbour 
shoots, like gigantic 
feelers, into the 
North Sea, we return 
to the outer light- 
house, and climb to 
the top. And now, 
far more vividly than 
in metres and kilo- 
metres and tons and 
cubic feet, we realise 
in a wide view all 
that we have been 
gazing at in detail. 
Here, unbroken, save 
where the harbour stretches a neck through them, are 
the dunes, from sixty to eighty feet high, that shelter 
the low-lying country from the ocean. But for them, 
the whole country to the very gates of Amsterdam 
would be at the mercy of the sea. To pierce them, 




The Ditch. 
From a drawing by Anton Mauve. 







/'""'/» 

^''^:^ 



The portion of the country marked ^j^H/; is under the level of the sea. 
The portion of the country marked W/I/I//I/I//1 is under the level of the rivers, 



242 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

trusting to these fragile arms to keep back the enemy, 
is surely daring confidence in human skill. To-day the 
sea lies peacefully shimmering in the sunlight; but 
think of it, as we have seen it many a time, thundering 
hoarsely under a grey sky. And then the eye turns in- 
land to the locks. Enormous locks and enormous gates, 
beautifully and ingeniously constructed, giants among 
engineering works, yet, after all, pigmies beside the 
ocean when the tide has risen six feet, say, above 
the normal water level of the Y at Amsterdam ! 
We need no figures to persuade us of the wonders 
of that sight. 

The whole story of the fight with the waters surely 
forces upon us the consideration that, howsoever 
brilliant and daring and successful it has been, if it 
have not an enduring and ennobling influence upon 
the national character, then it has been in vain. In it- 
self, to pump water out of peat-bogs, and to keep 
them drained, is not a high destiny, and in Holland it 
is not even a work that has repaid the cost. What, of 
itself, is another province of Zeeland gained? If there 
is no other result than that from all this expenditure of 
energies, it would have been better had William of 
Orange, as it is said he once contemplated, carried his 
people to a new home across the Atlantic, and allowed 
the sea to find and to keep its level right up to the 
Eastern sandhills. Ltictor ct Emergo would be a poor 
motto for Holland if she had come out of the fight 
possessed of nothing more than a few thousand hectares 
of land. Our figures and our descriptions have failed 



THE FIGHT WITH THE WATERS 243 

of their purpose if they have not called up to the 
reader the picture of a whole nation going about their 
daily work peacefully below the level of the sea, se- 
cure in the constructive skill and patience and daring 
that have bridled its powers, and opposed a barrier 
to its inexorable assaults. No estimate of Holland and 
the Hollanders is complete that omits that pregnant 
consideration. 







HOW HOLLAND IS EDUCATED 

IN several places earlier in this book, I have set 
down my impressions of education in Holland as it 
seemed to be discovered by Dutch men and women, 
in the relations of life which education chiefly influ- 
ences. I must ask the patience of the reader now, in 
following an outline of the scheme of education in 
Holland, so that these impressions of practical results 
may be supplemented by a plain statement of theo- 
retical opportunities. Those who are concerned with 
the question how far a practical education, an educa- 
tion that from the beginning keeps in view the spe- 
cial career for which its recipient is intended, is 
necessary for a nation that is to hold its own in the 
world, will find much to interest them in this pretty 
scheme of the Dutch ; while by the comparison which 
it institutes between Holland and herself, as it were, 
more light is cast upon the character and social con- 
ditions of her people. 

Elementary Education {Lager Onderwijs) in the 
State schools is divided into two grades. In the lower, 
the instruction must include reading, writing, arith- 
metic, the elements of Dutch grammar and Dutch 



HOW HOLLAND IS EDUCATED 245 

history, the elements of geography and natural his- 
tory^ some physics, singing, the rudiments of drawing, 
and simple calisthenics ; and girls are taught useful 
needlework. Children enter these schools at the age 
of six, having already (in the larger towns at least) 
passed through Infant Schools {Bewaar Scholen), which 
for the most part are free; there are half-yearly pro- 
motions, and the course is six years. To the instruc- 
tion of the lower schools are added, in the higher, 
French, German, English, and universal history, — 
some or all. 

The dividing line between the curricula of the lower 
and the higher schools is not very sharply defined. 
Thus, in Amsterdam the elementary schools range 
through four grades : 

(i) Mixed schools, for boys and girls from six to 
twelve. The instruction is that prescribed 
for lower schools, and the fee (from which 
poverty exempts) is a fraction over a penny 
a week. 

(2) Mixed schools, for boys and girls from six to 

twelve. The instruction is that of (i), with 
a little French ; and the fee is fourpence a 
week. 

(3) Separate schools for boys and girls. French, 

universal history, and an advanced course of 
calisthenics, are added to the subjects taught 
in (i), and the fee is 22 guilders (^i, i6s. 
Sd.) a year. 

(4) Separate schools for boys and girls. French, 



246 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

German, English, calisthenics, and universal 
history are added to the curriculum of (i). 
The pupils are kept until they are fourteen 
or sixteen, and for most girls the course is 
considered a sufficient education. The fee is 
75 guilders {£6, ^s.) a year. 
Varying conditions are found in all the larger towns : 
for example, the highest fees in Leeuwarden and 
Groningen are less than half the highest in Amster- 
dam. In all these schools, books and the necessary 
materials are supplied free. 

All over the country there are private elementary 
schools, especially for children whose parents wish 
for them religious instruction — an increasing class. 
Private schools of every kind are subject to the 
same educational and sanitary inspection as the 
State schools, and the teachers in both pass the same 
examinations. Speaking generally, adventure schools 
do not receive support from the State; they do, 
however, from the communes in many cases. For 
example, the case occurs to me of a private school 
for girls which receives 200 guilders a year from the 
commune in which it is situate, and 100 guilders 
from a neighbouring commune. The two villages 
consider it worth their while to contribute £2^ a 
year in support of a school v^hich may attract fami- 
lies to settle in them. The law, however, provides for 
State assistance to denominational schools which 
comply with certain conditions in the interest of 
Education in general. This is the result of a com- 




1-3 


< 


o 


^ 


^ 


fc/j 


o 


c 


u 





fe 



248 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

promise arrived at in 1888, when the joint clerical 
parties were in a majority in the Second Chamber. 

The teachers in the elementary schools are of 
two orders, according to the certificates they hold, 
Teachers and Head-Teachers ; and under the super- 
vision of a Head-Teacher classes may be taken by 
Assistant Teachers, who are young men and women, 
from fifteen to nineteen, studying for a Teacher's cer- 
tificate. Only a Head-Teacher can open a private 
school. When, as often happens, foreigners, English, 
French, or German girls, say, teach in such schools, 
they can do so as Assistant Teachers, that is to say, 
without passing any examination, up to the age of 
nineteen ; but after that they must have qualified by 
passing precisely the same examination in the lan- 
guage they profess (w^hich in most cases, of course, 
is their own language) as native teachers in the high- 
burgher schools, and even then they must have the 
Royal sanction. And deception as to age is not 
easy, for every foreigner settling in a commune in 
Holland has to lodge a certificate of birth with the 
burgomaster. Foreign teachers over nineteen are 
comparatively few in consequence. The training of 
teachers is carried on in a variety of institutions. 
In Nymegen, Maastricht, Deventer, Groningen, Haar- 
lem, 's Hertogenbosch, and Middelburg there are 
State Normal Schools, which admit, after examina- 
tion, pupils of fifteen or sixteen, and provide some 
twenty bursaries each of i^20 for brilliant students 
without private means. To each of these Normal 



HOW HOLLAND IS EDUCATED 249 

Schools is attached a Teaching School (^Lecr School) 
for practical instruction. Many communes have es- 
tablished Normal Schools on similar lines. The one 
in Amsterdam has a four years' course, and in the 
Leer School connected with it there are generally about 
three hundred young teachers in their third and fourth 
years of study. Leiden and Groningen have two-year- 
course Normal Schools also; that of Leiden especially 
has a very high repute. In places where there are 
no Normal Schools, the Head-Teachers in the pub- 
lic schools can give training instruction, "Normal 
Lessons " they are called, on Saturdays, and in the 
evenings. An examination has to be passed before 
admittance to these is granted. There are courses 
of instruction in twenty-six communes for candidates 
for a Head-Teacher's certificate. The State gives a 
grant to certain private establishments for the train- 
ing of teachers : such are the private training colleges 
for girls at Arnhem and Haarlem, the Roman Catholic 
training colleges at Eysden and Echt, in Limburg, the 
Netherlands Reformed Church's school in Amsterdam, 
and the so-called ''Christian-Schools" at the Hague 
and Zetten. The State and the communes spend 
about ^100,000 annually in the training of Teachers. 
Under the control of the Minister of the Interior, 
three Chief Inspectors supervise the education in all 
schools in the Maritime, the Southern, and the North- 
Eastern Provinces respectively, and they are assisted 
by twenty-five District and one hundred Arondisse- 
ment Inspectors. Further, there are local inspec- 



250 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

tions : in places with fewer than three thousand 
inhabitants by the burgomaster and magistrates ; in 
places with over three thousand, by a specially ap- 
pointed ** School Commission." 

To sum up. As yet, education is not compulsor3^ 
Elementary instruction, however, is provided in each 
commune, and relief is granted to parents who are 
too poor to pay the small fee charged for it. An 
extended elementary education is brought within the 
reach of almost all. In the higher elementary schools, 
children are taught — and taught to speak, chiefly — 
several modern languages while they are still of an 
age to acquire them easily and well ; and a little 
French is included in the curricula of all save the 
lowest schools. In the public schools, the education 
is strictly neutral in the matter of religion, but 
schools with special religious instruction are plenti- 
ful, and many of them are in receipt of State aid. 
All schools, whether supported by the State or not, 
adventure and denominational schools as well as the 
public schools, are under State supervision. No un- 
qualified person is allowed to teach in any school, and 
the qualification to teach practically is the same for 
all. 

Secondary Education {Middelbaar Onderwijs) covers 
all the instruction given in schools between the ele- 
mentary schools on the one hand and the gymnasia 
and the universities on the other. It is regulated by 
an Act of 1863, but the system introduced then has 
undergone many modifications. According to it, 



HOW HOLLAND IS EDUCATED 251 

secondary schools are of two classes: the lower, 
called Burgher Day and Night Schools (^Burger 
Dag-en- Avond-ScJiolen)y and the higher, High-Burgher 
Schools (yHooge Burger Sclioleii) with three and five 
years' courses. 

It is in connection with the burgher day schools 
that the chief change has been made. Established 
originally for industrial and agricultural workmen^ 
these day schools were failures, and most of them 
were closed twenty years ago. The only one still in 
existence is at Leeuwarden, where the course em- 
braces mathematics, elementary mechanics, physics 
and chemistry, natural history, technical instruction 
in agriculture, the elements of geography and history, 
the rudiments of the Dutch language, simple social 
economy, artistic and mechanical drawing, and calis- 
thenics. 

To take the place of these burgher day schools, 
there have been established technical or industrial 
schools, for the training of carpenters, blacksmiths, 
joiners, mechanics, painters, turners, plumbers, and 
the like. As a rule, there is a three years' course of 
instruction, and a fair pass in the elementary schools 
is demanded before entrance ; but local conditions con- 
trol the entrance examinations, the length of the course, 
and the nature of the curriculum. In Enschede, for 
example, weaving and artistic draughtsmanship are 
taught. In the school for mechanics in Amsterdam 
the course is four semestres and a year of practical 
work ; after which a diploma is granted which gener- 



2^2 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

ally ensures employment in the sugar-refineries of 
Java, in railway construction, ship-building, and the 
like, or as engineers on board ship at home or in the 
colonies. 

In Amsterdam, The Hague, Arnhem, and Rotterdam 
there are industrial schools for women, open to pupils 
with a fair pass from the elementary schools who are 
over thirteen years of age. In these the lower school 
studies are continued, and there are classes in fancy- 
work, book-keeping, the making and drawing of pat- 
terns, wood-engraving, drawing and painting on wood, 
satin, and china. All the materials used are free. At 
the end of the free three-years' course, the girls are 
taught for a small fee dressmaking for six months, 
and there are evening classes in fancy-work for those 
who wish. In the Amsterdam school, special atten- 
tion is paid to drawing, and to the training of lady 
assistant-chemists. 

In some sixty towns in Holland there are day schools 
for instruction in drawing. The Fine Art Academy at 
The Hague has no fewer than eight different courses. 
It is attended by five hundred or six hundred students, 
men and women of all ages and classes, of whom fully 
ten per cent go forward to the examinations. At 
the Haarlem School for Decorative Art, which in the 
evenings workmen can attend, botany is made a special 
study. Lectures are given in the Rijks Museum in 
connection with the Amsterdam School of Decorative 
Art. The application of architecture, sculpture, and 
painting to all branches of industry is the special 






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254 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

study; there are two courses of two years each, and 
diplomas are granted. Two different diplomas — 
*' Maitre de dessin," for lower drawing, and '* Profes- 
seur," for advanced — are given after the three-years' 
course in the State Normal Drawing School in 
Amsterdam. 

So much for the industrial schools which have taken 
the place of the unsuccessful burgher day schools 
established in 1863. Meanwhile the burgher night 
schools, founded at the same time, have increased in 
number and in reputation. There are in Holland to- 
day some forty of them, attended for the most part 
by working men and women who have obtained a fair 
pass in the lower schools. Most of them are free or 
the fee does not exceed lOs. per year; the cost is 
borne by the communes, and special instruction is 
given in the local industries and manufactures. 

The largest of the night schools is in Rotterdam. 
The special subjects taught in it are modelling, anatomy, 
the history of architecture and of sculpture, and hor- 
ticultural drawing, and, for mechanics, English, 
arithmetic, algebra, geometry, physics, artistic and 
mechanical drawing. Over a thousand students are 
in attendance at this school. 

In Leiden, again, in addition to the curriculum of the 
day schools, there is special instruction in the princi- 
ples of ornament, modelling, architecture, and hydrau- 
lics ; and in Utrecht there are classes for training car- 
penters, bricklayers, blacksmiths, instrument makers, 
joiners and stone-cutters, goldsmiths and sculptors, 



HOW HOLLAND IS EDUCATED 255 

painters and lithographers. The Utrecht school has 
generally about two hundred and fifty pupils. 

All this practical instruction comes under the head 
of Secondary Education, the higher and more theo- 
retical branches of which are supplied by the high- 
burgher schools. These high-burgher schools are of 
two grades : those with a five-years' and those with a 
three-years' course. The conditions of entrance and 
the qualifications of the teachers are pretty much the 
same for both : the course of the one is the first three 
years of the other. There are twenty-four three-years 
high-burgher schools in Holland, ten of them founded 
by the State. Of the thirty-nine five-years schools 
those at Tilburg, 's Hertogenbosch, Gouda, Alkmaar, 
Middelburg, Utrecht, Leeuwarden, Zwolle, Groningen, 
Assen, and Roermond are State schools, and the re- 
mainder, including a commercial school at Amsterdam, 
are founded by the communes. There is also a free 
Roman Catholic training school for the priesthood at 
Rolduc. 

The age of entrance is twelve years, and there is a 
preliminary examination. The instruction, carried over 
the five years, includes mathematics, physics, mechan- 
ics, chemistry, natural history, cosmography, the study 
of the political institutions of the Netherlands, social 
economy, artistic and mechanical drawing, geography, 
history, the literatures of Holland, France, England, 
and Germany, book-keeping and the commercial 
sciences, caligraphy and calisthenics. At the five- 
years school at Amsterdam, the pupils pay four hun- 



256 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

dred guilders (;^33, 6s. Sd.') a year: the ''golden 
school " it is called. The fees at The Hague are 
lOO guilders, and elsewhere they range from 50 to 60 
guilders. 

There are high-burgher schools for girls at Arnhem, 




Soldier. 
From a drawing by Papendrecht. 

The Hague, Rotterdam, Leiden, Dordrecht, Haarlem., 
Leeuwarden, Utrecht, Groningen, Amsterdam (two), 
and Deventer. Except at Deventer, all these schools 
have a five-years' course; and the ladies who teach 
pass the same examination as the teachers in the boys* 
schools. The course of instruction, too, is much the 



HOW HOLLAND IS EDUCATED 257 

same as with the boys, but the use of the needle is 
carefully taught, from plain sewing in the first year to 
" cutting-out" in the fifth. Every girl is taught to sew. 
For music, a girl has to go to a music school, and she 
is sent only if she shows a natural talent ; whereby 
one of the horrors of our home life is escaped. Mrs. 
Lecky, who knows, wrote in an English magazine a 
year or two ago that ''Dutch girls of all classes are 
proficient in needlework, and in the remotest fisher- 
micn's villages the neatness of the quaint and often 
elaborate costumes, of the linen on the bed and in the 
press, is faultless." Every one who has lived in Hol- 
land must have noticed so much, and possibly may 
have had an opportunity of seeing the skilful needle- 
work of the orphanages. The Industrie School voor 
Meisjes in the Wetering Schans in Amsterdam, the 
industrial school for girls already referred to, has a 
very high repute. The coach which the people of 
Holland presented to their young Queen for her Coro- 
nation was embroidered and decorated there. The 
pre-eminence of the Dutchwoman in sewing, however, 
is not in fancy-work. I have seen more artistic sewing 
in farmhouses and decayed shipping towns of Scotland 
than in any Dutch huis-kamer , but never anywhere 
more beautiful useful needlework, mending and patch- 
ing. In many Dutch families still the saying is that 
machine should never touch linen. 

There remain to be mentioned under the head of 
Secondary Education certain schools of instruction in 
one or other special subjects. An annual course in 

17 



258 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

butter-making in the school of Bolsward, in Friesland, 
is open to women who are seventeen years of age, and 
have had good elementary instruction. It is rather 
curious that it is at Bolsward that one of the largest but- 
ter-making works has been established, with the result 
that the local butter market is rapidly decaying. The 
same subject is very successfully taught on farms in 
Overysel and Gelderland lent by the proprietors for the 
purpose. Those who receive the diploma as agricultu- 
rist in the State Agricultural School at Wageningen 
are allowed to proceed to a course of forestry. The 
Horticultural and Forestry Schools Gerard Adriaan 
van Swieten, on the ground of the Society of Charity, 
and the van Swieten School of Agriculture on De 
ronde Blesse, at the same place, are all very successful. 
There is a Veterinary School in Utrecht, and instruc- 
tion in horseshoeing is given at Assen, Winschoten, 
Haarlem, Wageningen, Venloo, Glyteren and Weesp. 
Further, there are State agricultural teachers ; and 
** walking agriculturists," chief among them *'Ericus" 
(M. Baron), whose lectures are well attended. 

A word about the qualifications to teach in the 
elementary and the secondary schools. The certifi- 
cate of Teacher is fairly easily gained ; there is a wide 
range of subjects, but only the elements are professed, 
and no languages. To teach a language in the lower 
schools, a special examination in it must be passed ; 
as a matter of fact most Teachers hold a certificate for 
elementary French or English. The examination for 
a Head-Teacher is much more difficult; still, the diffi- 




The Farm. 
From a water-colour drawing by Anton Mauve. 



26o HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

culty is due to the wide range of subjects, not to the 
high proficiency demanded in any one. With those 
who teach in the high-burgher schools {Leeraren), it 
is quite different. If the school is one with a five- 
years' course, they must hold a university degree, or 
the equivalent diploma granted by government. The 
women teachers (^Leeraressen) must all win the diploma. 
It is given for each subject, separately, and a very 
complete knowledge of the one subject professed is 
required. Generally, diplomas for two subjects are held. 
From this survey of secondary education in Hol- 
land, it will be seen that there is ample provision for 
technical training, and further that in the higher — 
the high-burgher — schools, no less than in the purely 
industrial schools, the instruction is strictly practical 
and "modern." Latin is not taught in them. It is 
not even taught in the high-burgher schools for girls. 
If girls are to learn Latin, they must attend the gym- 
nasia, and the result is that although many Dutch 
women are splendidly educated, comparatively few of 
them know any Latin. There is thus a change from 
an earlier condition of things in Holland when, trav- 
ellers tell us, men and women could be found in all 
ranks able to conduct a conversation in Latin fluently. 
Under the present system, there is a parting of the 
educational way at the end of the elementary course. 
The path through the secondary schools, we have 
seen, is designed to lead to a commercial and indus- 
trial life. We will now follow that through the gym- 
nasia to the universities. 



HOW HOLLAND IS EDUCATED 261 

The gymnasium is the preparatory school for the 
university. An Act passed twenty years ago provided 
for a gymnasium, with a course of six years, in every 
town of over twenty thousand inhabitants. It per- 
mitted smaller towns to have a pro-gymnasium with a 
four-years' course, but these pro-gymnasia were abol- 
ished ten years later. 

Gymnasia are found in the following places : Prov- 
ince of Brabant: 's Hertogenbosch, Breda; Province 
of Gelderland : Arnhem, Nymegen, Zutphen, Doetin- 
chem, Tiel ; Province of Limburg: Maastricht; Prov- 
ince of Overysel : Deventer, Kampen, Zwolle ; Province 
of Utrecht : Utrecht, Amersfoort ; Province of Drente : 
Assen ; Province of Groningen : Groningen, Winscho- 
ten ; Province of Friesland : Leeuwarden, Sneek; Prov- 
ince of North-Holland : Amsterdam, Haarlem ; Province 
of South-Holland : Rotterdam, The Hague, Leiden, 
Delft, Dordrecht, Gorcum, Gouda, Schiedam; Prov- 
ince of Zeeland : Middelburg. 

Each of these communes supports its own gymna- 
sium, but the State gives a grant to all except Amster- 
dam, The Hague, and (for a special reason) Kampen. 
Kampen, it so happens, is a town with many possessions, 
and the rates and the scale of living are very low, in 
consequence. In Kampen, therefore, the fee for the 
gymnasium is only 30 guilders (;^2, los.^ a year. Else- 
where, pupils at the gymnasium pay from 70 to 100 
guilders. Pupils enter the gymnasium when twelve 
years of age, and the course over the six years includes 
Greek, Latin, Dutch, French, German, history, geog- 



262 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

raphy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and natural 
history. The professors at the gymnasium must pos- 
sess a university degree, or they must have passed an 
equivalent examination fixed by government. At the 
end of the gymnasium course there is a passing ex- 
amination into the universities. 

There are four universities in Holland : Leiden, 
established in 1575; Groningen, in 1614; Utrecht, in 
1634; and Amsterdam, which was an Athenaeum 
from 1630 until it was made a university in 1872-73. 
Two other universities, Franeker, in Friesland, dating 
from 1585, and Harderwijk, on the Veluwe, from 1648, 
were closed by Napoleon in 181 1. In each of the 
existing universities there are the five Faculties of 
Theology, Jurisprudence, Medicine, Mathematics and 
Physics, and Philology. To obtain the doctor's degree, 
the student must pass a professional examination and 
a doctoral examination ; after that follows the public 
promotion. The degree of Doctor is given in : 

L Theology. 

n. The Sciences of Law or Politics. 

IIL Medicine, Surgery and Obstetrics. 

IV. (a) Mathematics and Astronomy, (b) Mathe- 
matics and Physics, (c) Chemistry, (d) Miner- 
alogy and Geology, (e) Botany and Zoology, 
(f) Pharmacy. 

V. (a) Classical Literature, (b) Semitical Litera- 

ture, (c) Dutch Literature, (d) Language 
and Literature of the Indian Archipelago, 
(e) Philosophy. 



HOW HOLLAND IS EDUCATED 263 

All students at the universities, however, do not aim 
at a doctor's degree : most theological students, for 
example, after passing the candidate's examination, go 
before a commission of clergymen and are admitted as 
" Proponents." Then they are eligible to be called to 
a Protestant Church. Many medical students, again, 
are content to pass the State examination, the essen- 
tial scientific examination which gives one the title of 
Physician {Arts), without writing and defending the 
thesis which wins the ornamental title '' doctor." In- 
deed, most medical students are not eligible for the 
doctor's degree, for they come from the high-burgher 
school, and the doctor's degree can only be obtained 
by students who have passed through the gymnasia, 
or have passed an equivalent examination. Amster- 
dam is the great medical university. Utrecht, the 
centre of orthodox opinion, sends out the greatest 
number of theological students, whereas Leiden, which 
teaches a more liberal theology, is strongest in law. 
At Utrecht and Leiden, there are observatories, and 
there astronomy is studied chiefly. 

The nominal course at the universities is four years 
for Law, six or seven for Literature, five for Theology, 
and six or seven for Philosophy, and seven or eight 
for Medicine. Most students in Law, however, remain 
longer than four years. All students pay £16, 13^. 4^. 
(200 guilders) each year for four years; thereafter 
they attend classes free. 

The Free University of Amsterdam is only a Cal- 
vinistic institution for the study of Theology, Law, 



264 HOLLAND AND THE HOLLANDERS 

Philosophy, and Letters. The Polytechnic School at 
Delft ranks as half a university, half a school; and 
the Institution for instruction about the languages and 
peoples of the Indian Archipelago, in the same town, 
and the State School in Leiden on similar lines, have 
a somewhat similar standing. 

The principal Roman Catholic seminaries are at 
St. Michielsgestel, Kuilenburg, Driebergen, Voorhout, 
Warmond, Roermond, and Rolduc. At Amsterdam 
there are seminaries of the Evangelical Lutherans, 
Confessional Lutherans, and the Baptists ; the chief 
training college of the Remonstrants is at Leiden, and 
that of the Reformed Christians is at Kampen. 




'S HERTOGENBOSCH AND THE SOUTHERN 

PROVINCES 

S HERTOGENBOSCH is the northern gate of the 
southern provinces. As has been seen, the 
Dutch geographers cite it as the typical town in Hol- 
land of the Franks. It is, at any rate, the typical town 
of the Roman Catholics, and the fitting capital there- 
fore of North-Brabant. 

Like almost all Dutch towns, it is prettily situate. 
Set flat upon the plain, the towns in Holland originally 
were fortified : a ring canal or river — a singel — sur- 
rounded them, with ramparts on the inner bank. Now 
the fortifications have been demolished, and the ram- 
parts converted into walks and gardens, shad}^ and 
delightful, by the waterside. As a rule, the railway 
only skirts the towns, and the traveller, descending at 
^-^he station, enters them by bridge and plantsoen, — 
an engaging approach. If the town is extending or 
has extended in recent years, the new part outside the 
singel is ugly and raw, and at best it is Suburbia; 
inside the canal, you are certain to find everything 
quaint and most things beautiful. That is true of all 
the towns of Holland, and therefore of Den Bosch. 
It is not so beautiful, nor has it so beautiful an ap- 
proach, as Groningen, Utrecht, Zwolle, and many 



266 *S HERTOGENBOSCH 

others that might be mentioned. But though it is not 
specially handsome within, it is not so distressingly- 
shabby without as Utrecht, or, to take an example 
nearer it, Breda. That means, no doubt, that it is not 
such a flourishing town as either. As the Dutch say. 
it is in verval, or in decline. Such is the impression 
left upon me by everything I have seen and heard in 
Den Bosch except the declarations of the inhabitants. 
I remember it as composed of uninteresting, straggling 
streets; a very monotonous city, not at all distin- 
guished. The large irregular market-place may be 
picturesque, as most Dutch market-places are, when 
crowded with peasants and their farm-stock, at the 
Wednesday's cattle-mart; but certainly it is not so 
when huddled on other mornings with stalls of cheap 
clothing and confections and ware, and old rusty iron, 
or when, after mid-day, it is deserted by all its mean 
traffickers. The buildings that surround it are not 
striking. The Town Hall, for example, is not, and it 
contains the most depressing collection of antiquities 
(if the coins be excepted), that ever a concierge had to 
make a story about. 

The Town Hall ought to be visited, nevertheless, on 
account of the decorative panels it contains by the 
young artist Derkinderen, who is a native of the town. 
Other examples of this designer's work are to be seen 
in a stained-glass window in the staircase of the new 
university building in Utrecht, and in a panel, " The 
Procession of the Miracle in Amsterdam," in the 
Municipal Museum of Amsterdam. The Den Bosch 






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268 'S HERTOGENBOSCH 

paintings are as medieval in sentiment as they are 
modern in treatment ; and apart from their artistic 
qualities are interesting to the visitor here because, 
symbolically, they tell the story of the founding of the 
city. The artist's intention has been explained in a 
pamphlet by M. Jan Veth, himself one of the most 
distinguished of young Dutch artists, to whom I am 
indebted for much of the description that follows. 
Tradition carries us back to a hunting-lodge in a great 
wood at the junction of the Dommel and the Aa, be- 
longing to Henry of Brabant, round which 's Hertogen- 
bosch sprang up. This is represented in the central 
panel. The Duke on horseback, with a falcon on his 
hand, is attended by huntsmen with greyhounds in 
leash; behind him rise the towers of the lodge, and 
the building of the town round it is suggested in the 
background. Two stalwart figures in the foreground 
represent labour, and the man nearer the Duke is a 
spokesman of the people. Round this central story 
of the rise of Den Bosch are grouped other paintings, 
in which is indicated with fine artistic ingenuity the 
condition of the world at that time. The figures in 
the wings are Pope Urban and the Emperor Frederick 
Barbarossa, the two great ruling powers. The various 
panels of the frieze are descriptive of the Crusades. 
In one, Peter the Hermit kneeling in prayer receives 
for his mission the authority of the robed Christ. 
In others are depicted Godfried of Bouillon, v/ith 
Hugo, the founder of the Templars, and Gerard, the 
Grand-Master of the Order of St. John, on either side; 



THE PAINTINGS OF DERKINDEREN. 269 

Bernard of Cialrvaux, the Emperor again, and the 
King of France ; Richard the Lion Heart ; and Wil- 
liam, Count of Holland, the grandson of Henry of 
Brabant, who founded Den Bosch, and the Crusader 
who led the Dutch and the Frisians against Damiate, 
the expedition which the silver models of ships and 
the bells in the great church of Haarlem commemo- 
rate. Hajo van Wolvega, with his flail, represents the 
small Dutch nobility; and Olivier of Cologne and 
Jean de Joinville, the historians of the Crusades. In 
still another section, Louis the Holy lies on his death- 
bed at Tunis. Above the frieze are proverbs that 
still further illustrate the history of the Crusades. In 
order to equalise the wall-space, which is pierced 
irregularly by a door-way, a band or ribbon runs up 
to the frieze and is crowned by the Christ; and on 
this are inscribed the arms of the Pope and the Em- 
peror, then those of Brabant, and under them again 
the arms of 's Hertogenbosch, with those of Brus- 
sels, Antwerp, and Louvain to indicate the ties of 
friendship by which the four cities of Brabant are 
bound. At the foot of the scroll is inscribed : *' In 
the days when the Christians went towards the East 
in the Crusades, when Urban was Pope and Frederick 
Emperor, then, under Henry, Duke of Brabant, Den 
Bosch was founded, and Brussels, Antwerp, and Lou- 
vain built the gates." The scheme of decoration is 
continued in a separate panel, less ecclesiastical in 
character, filled with a painting symbolising Charity, 
one of the four virtues which, it seems, always has 



270 'S HERTOGENBOSCH 

distinguished the people of Den Bosch. The painter 
does not inform us what the other virtues are, and 
in our visit to the city we failed to discover them. 

This fine and interesting work of Derkinderen has 
been inspired not a little, we may suppose, by the one 
object possessed by 's Hertogenboscli that is unri- 
valled in Holland, — the Church of St. John. Not only 
is it one of the largest of the Dutch churches, and 
perhaps the finest architecturally, but it is the only 
one that is well preserved within. Haarlem, Leiden, 
Utrecht, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam possess Gothic 
churches, all of them handsome externally. Round 
all of them, little buildings have been allowed to 
cluster, till their proportions have been almost hidden. 
So it is especially with the old church in Amsterdam. 
The Haarlem church, it has always seemed to me, 
gains as well as loses in appearance by being buttressed 
thus by shops and houses ; but, for better or worse, 
these adjoining buildings in Haarlem are being re- 
moved. All of the churches that have been men- 
tioned, however, have sufi'ered from the iconoclasm of 
the Protestants. In all of them, whitewash has been 
used with frightful efi"ect. A portion, the whole nave 
generally, is enclosed by a wooden screen of singular 
ugliness, and within it are the pews and chairs, and on 
Sundays the melancholy services, of the Reformed 
Faith. A carved pulpit, perhaps, remains, or a fine 
old chandelier ; but that is all. In the dreary outer 
courts, sometimes, there is a piece of fine sculpture, 
as at Breda and Utrecht ; or some glass, as at Gouda. 



CHURCHES IN HOLLAND 271 

All else is desecration, and the abomination of 
Reform. 

To this, the Church of St. John in Den Bosch is an 
exception. It still is a Catholic church, and treated 
reverently. Inside, the eye takes in the true propor- 
tions. It is enabled to do so the more easily that the 
choir-screen has been removed, and the eye ranges 
uninterruptedly from end to end of the building. The 
screen, a beautiful piece of work, can be seen in South 
Kensington Museum, to which it was sold for ;^900; 
and that sum is being spent upon interior decorations, 
— not always, it is to be feared, in great taste. 

There is an interesting point connected with the 
restoration and preservation of Dutch churches. The 
work on the exterior is undertaken by the State, as 
being upon a building of antiquity; while interior 
restoration and decoration is left to the church itself. 
The present architect of the State, from personal pre- 
dilections it happens, but also with a right artistic 
sense, is introducing into his restorations much orna- 
ment of a kind that is only to be seen in Roman Cath- 
olic churches. Thus in the Protestant church at 
Zutphen, a small statue of the Virgin had been placed 
above the west door, with a very pleasing effect. Its 
appearance there has caused many searchings of heart 
among the ultra-Calvinists, but the more enlightened 
do not feel that they worship in a less Protestant man- 
ner because of the Madonna looking down upon them 
as they enter to their devotions. 

Brabant and Limburg, the southern provinces, for the 



272 'S HERTOGENBOSCH 

most part lie away from the route of the traveller who 
makes the railway journey round about Holland. Of 
Limburg I can speak from repute only. "You must 
see Limburg. Limburg is the garden of Holland " — 
so the stranger is told by his Dutch acquaintances, 
who prove to him, thus, that he need not expect to 
find anything very typical of Holland there. It is, of 
course, because it offers a contrast to their own dis- 
tricts that the Dutch in the centre and north are enthu- 
siastic about it. For one thing, it lies high, — in the 
south, as much as seven hundred feet above sea-level. 
Undulating fields of wheat, with lively streams playing 
through them, take the place of level and sleepy mea- 
dows and canals. South Limburg grows great quan- 
tities of fruit and vegetables, — the Dutchman gets his 
earliest asparagus and strawberries from there, — so 
that that part of the province is rightl}/ named a 
garden. For those beyond the benefits of its early 
asparagus, Limburg has a greater interest in possessing 
the only mines in Holland. They are found in the 
extreme southeast, and are worked, I believe, by a 
railway company who holds them from government, on 
a ninety-nine years' lease, half of which has still to run. 
The output is extremely small, and the coals are only 
used locally. In the same part of the country, near 
Maastricht, are the tufa quarries of the St. Petersberg, 
with I know not how many thousands of labyrinthine 
passages, extending to I know not how many miles ; 
grottoes in which, according to the guide-books, the 
temperature is always at about 50° Fahr., and no ani- 




In Maastricht. 
From a drawing by A. L. Kost^r. 



274 'S HERTOGENBOSCH 

mal or plant life exists; to which rather dreary picture 
the colour of human interest is lent by the thought 
of the peasants flying to the quarries with their cattle 
in the times of the great wars. Another thing in Lim- 
burg, of which the Dutch speak much, is the manu- 
factory of ware in Maastricht. Some years ago there 
was a Parliamentary inquiry into the condition of the 
workmen there, which afterwards dragged on for many 
months as a Government Inquiry, and the revelations 
greatly shocked the Dutch. That was several years 
ago, but the Limburg manufactories are still spoken of 
in the north — with what amount of justification I can- 
not say — as places of social degradation. 

All this, however, is hearsay. In Limburg I have, 
literally, set foot only. When paying a flying visit to 
the Peel, which will always be one of the pleasantest 
recollections of Holland, our host brought us to the 
very border of the beautiful place in which he lives in 
the midst of that forlorn tract, and bade us step across 
it upon the moorland, in order that we might say we had 
been in Limburg province. The Peel lies partly in it, 
partly in Brabant: a great stretch of high fen, once 
impassable almost, from which the peat is being dug 
now. But it will be best if we return to see the work 
of reclamation on the Peel after we have visited the 
older fen-colonies in the provinces farther north. 

Brabant is not so well-known as it ought to be to 
the visitor in Holland. It is true that it has no arrest- 
ing characteristics. It wears no air of distinction ; is 
not impressive, or picturesque like the Dutch Low- 



A KLOMPEN-SHOP 275 

lands, or even in any way unfamiliar. But its broken 
undergrowth and informal villages give it the negligent 
rusticity that is the staple of our dreams when we are 
sweltering in cities. A most refreshing country for 
the simple, cheerful man, who likes to wend his holiday 
steps through not too heroic places, and to let his 
thoughts chase one another through a sunny country- 
side irresponsibly with the birds and the butterflies. 
I am reminded by a martyr to the stony roads which 
Napoleon drove through the west of the province, 
even through the beautiful woods there, and especially 
the main road from 's Hertogenbosch to Bergen-op- 
Zoom, by Tilburg and Breda, that tlie cyclist is to be 
warned against them. In east Brabant, however, the 
roads are excellent, for foot and for wheel. And the 
country folk accord with their landscape: a rather 
poor and ignorant people, but chatty and polite, and 
always in a busy pother about their work. Perhaps 
the reader would like to share-'with me a glimpse 
beyond their roof-trees. 

In a hamlet in the neighbourhood of Helmond is a 
little workshop for the manufacture of wooden shoes, 
with an open door that bids us shelter from the thun- 
derstorm rolling up from over Eindhoven. We cross 
the threshold, and stand ankle-deep in poplar shavings. 
An apprentice boy stops in his work of rudely shaping 
the wood-clumps, and eyes us boldly. Farther off, 
gouging the white oily wood out of the roughly fash- 
ioned shoes, is the master of the place, an elderly little 
man, clean-shaven, with a small inquisitive eye. He 



2/6 'S HERTOGENBOSCH 

straightens himself for a moment as our shadow falls 
lightly on his bench, nods, and bends to his work 
again. Our " good-day " is answered by his wife, who 
is seated at the back of the workshop : a woman of 
middle age, with handsome brows and nose and lips, 
and cheeks of the splendid colour of the haw. " Would 
Mynheer like to be seated?" Mynheer would be 
delighted. She flings down the shoes she is carving, 
and from an inner shed brings out a chair. We talk 
of the road we have come, and of the storm, the first 
raindrops of which are spluttering on the window pane 
behind her. The man lifts his inquisitive face to strike 
in with a question. *' We are from America? No? 
England? He had never been in England, but once 
he had been in Rotterdam. No, never so far as Am- 
sterdam. His vrouw? — Oh, no (this with a laugh) ; 
but often in 's Hertogenbosch." " With eggs and 
chickens," she chimes in, smiling with a gleam of white 
teeth. The storm bursts with a flash and a peal, and 
the woman, the colour mounting on her cheeks, crosses 
herself hastily, and mumbles a few words. " From 
London? " asks the man, whose mind works round an 
inquisitive pivot like a gin-horse; and when I assent, 
*' London 's a big country? " the woman inquires. 
" London's a town, — like Amsterdam, not a country," 
the man who has been as far as Rotterdam corrects 
her. '' I know, well enough," she replies curtly, her 
eye flashing up at him before she bends to her work. 

I discreetly bring back the conversation to the coun- 
try-side, and all the new manufactories, engineering 



A KLOMPEN-SHOP 277 

works, and the like that are springing up in this corner 
of the country. " You are wakening up, down here." 
They don't know anything about that, but the burgo- 
master is a brewer, and has put two of his sons into a 
cigar-making business. " B for Brabant, for Beer, and 
for 'Baccy," a Dutch alphabet ought to run. That was 
the cigar factory which we passed half-a-mile higher 
up. Women are not employed, I find out, and the 
men earn about 15^. a week. Nine guilders a week 
is more than a living wage in the country parts in the 
east of Holland. They make bigger wages in London, 
the woman supposes, and the man that everything will 
cost more. Now in this corner of Holland, they rent 
this workshop, and the house behind, and two bunders 
of land for 60 guilders a year; that is, four or five 
acres and house and workshop for ^^5. They keep a 
cow sometimes, and hens and goats. '* If Mynheer 
would see — ? " 

The establishment I am shown over is little better 
than a piggery. Behind the workshop is a shed, and 
at right angles to it, running the depth of shed and 
shop, a narrow stall in which the cow is kept, when 
they have one. At present it seems empty, but by- 
and-by, as the eye gets accustomed to the darkness, 
it discerns two wise-visaged goats in the far-off corner. 
Every few minutes the thunder bursts, as it seems, 
among the dim rafters above us, where, between the 
peals, a turtle-dove is cooing. The woman, crossing 
herself at every step, leads the way into the living- 
room. It is almost bare of furniture, quite bare of orna- 



278 'S HERTOGENBOSCH 

ment except for a few cheap Catholic prints upon the 
walls. An open fire burns in one corner. In a 
smaller inner room there is a stove. From a recess, 
the woman produces the plate of goat's-milk butter 
which she has been anxious to show me all the time. 
Her pride of housewifery, so evident in her face, com- 
pels me to admire the poor, sickly-looking product. 
When I come back to the shop, the man is still busily 
scooping out his klompen — a boy's pair, he has told 
me, for which he will get a few pence. Fortunately, 
boys get through wooden soles even more quickl}^ 
than leather ones, and the man is kept busy. " Al- 
ways at work? " I ask, ''no holidays? " "Ah, yes! the 
kermis ! " It is months off, but the mention of it 
brings brightness to their faces. " And what do you 
do at the kermis?" I inquire. The woman puts her 
hand to her mouth, tilts back her head, and nods in the 
direction of the man. He grins. ''Geneva," I say; 
" but that is for you. What about the vroitwf "But 
yes, she also," he says, and the woman gives a little 
laugh that is corroboration of the statement. " But 
not the boy, at least," I say. " It is your boy, is it 
not? " " Nay," she replies, in a tone that shows what 
is her sorrow. " I have no children — he is a knecht.'' 
"But he doesn't drink Geneva?" "Now, doesn't 
he? " says the man, and the knecht grins. 

The storm has passed to the eastwards, and I must 
step on my way. It puzzles me how I shall manage 
to give a gratuity to these polite people, till I think 
of a baby-girl in England, whose little feet will be an 



THE TOWNS OF NORTH BRABANT 279 

excellent excuse for ordering the daintiest pair of 
wooden shoes the woman can carve for them. The 
•puzzle will be, even paying liberally for ornament and 
postage, to convert the anticipated few pence into a 
respectable sum. So I think; but I need not have 
troubled. The price of wooden shoes has gone up 
in Brabant in the last ten minutes, and I leave the 
hospitable klompen'sho"^ the richer for many good 
wishes, but the poorer by several guilders. A chatty, 
polite, and very wide-awake people. But the little 
maid duly received her wooden shoes, and one house- 
hold in Brabant at least has a nest-egg against the next 
kermis. 

We have lingered so long in this pleasant country 
that there is time for little more than a passing glimpse 
of the towns in the north of the province, along the 
railway route from Flushing. From the islands of 
Zeeland, the traveller passes into Brabant through 
Bergen-op-Zoom, and if he is interested in the physio- 
graphical condition of Holland, let him note how 
rapid is the transition at this point from the treeless, 
flat meadows on the sea-clay to the well-clad sandy 
slopes. Round about Bergen-op-Zoom there has 
sprung up of recent years a sugar-beet industry, that 
may put new life into the old town that has had its 
days of greatness, and by the art of Coehorn was con- 
verted into a fortress worthy of facing Antwerp. Til- 
burg, again, can boast of no antiquity. It is a town 
of woollen manufactories, — the Leeds of Holland, — 
which has prospered by the separation of Belgium, 



2Bo 



'S HERTOGENBOSCH 



and at the next census will probably show a greater 
increase of population than any other town in the 
country. Between Tilburg and Bergen-op-Zoom lies 
Breda, greatly more interesting than either. It is the 
good and pleasant 
town that Guicchar- 
dini found it, and the 
sumptuous castle with 
the double ditch of 
water he writes of 
still remains, alto- 
gether restored, of 
course, and no longer 
the residence of the 
Princes of Orange. 
The castle is now a 
college for cadets, 
which gives the town 
a military air. The 
visitor must see the 
Spaniard's Hole, 
where the peat boat 
lay, at the east port, 
with its load of vol- 
unteers whom Mau- 
rits sent to take the castle, the story of which is one 
of the most striking pages in Motley. But nothing 
in the history of Breda and none of Its old buildings 
are quite so interesting as the prison, which probably 
is the newest thing in it. 




The Church of Breda. 



ISOLATED CONVICTS. 281 

The prison in Breda is a rotunda of brick, set in one 
end of an oblong piece of Brabant sand-soil enclosed 
by high brick walls of beautiful Flemish bond. It 
wears a fresh, almost a gay air. A lightsome dome- 
roof, and clean red-brick walls pierced by trim little 
windows (picked out, of course, with white) with the 
iron bars so painted as not to be conspicuous, suggest 
anything but a prison. Anything less like Holloway 
you could not imagine. When first you come upon it 
you say, the Circus Carre ; the next moment, some- 
thing, you could not tell what, about it, makes you 
change your mind in favour of a scientific institution, a 
theatre for vivisection, say. It is new, like science, and 
prisons are old, nearly as old as crime. It smacks of 
paint, being Dutch; and smells (once you enter) of 
carbolic rather than of skilly, being the really, modern, 
up-to-date prison you were told to expect. And up-to- 
date means humane ; we shall see. 

In the front wall is a porter's lodge in a rather cheap 
castellated style, whereby the yard is entered. The 
first thing for the eye to light on is a Black Maria. 
Underneath it at this moment, oiling the springs or 
painting the axle-tree, is a figure in coarse brown cloth, 
wooden shoes, and the features covered by a veil of 
blue stuff with two hideous large eye-holes. Now we 
remember : this is a prison on the isolated cell principle. 
The very Black Maria is partitioned so that one poor 
devil may not recognise another ; no cheerful human 
huddling even there. Once inside his cell, the convict 
may not speak to living being, or hear speech that is not 



282 'S HERTOGENBOSCH 

a command or a priest's or chaplain's exhortation, till 
his sentence is worked off, and that may be five years. 
Each day he is veiled and conducted to a brick shed in 
the open with an iron grating diabolically shut out 
from the vision of any other iron grating, and here he 
exercises himself like a hyena in a cage, for half an 
hour. Then he is led back to his ceil, and blessed 
work. If he behaves well, he is allowed betimes an in- 
terview with wife or child or friend, if that can be 
called an interview at which the sight of the visitor is 
denied him, and he, shut up in one cage, must speak 
through a perforated sheet of metal with his visitor 
shut up in another, and a warder in a third between. 
Is he sick? Then he goes to hospital ; but all by him- 
self, in an hospital all by itself. Sick in soul, as all of 
us are supposed to be, he is sent to church, and 
occupies a cage that would be condemned in any 
menagerie as too small for an orang-outang; the caged 
ape can stand at least, but the convict for very want of 
room to do otherwise must sit on a spar, one of a 
hundred or more of his kind thus caged and seated and 
shut off from vision, grateful for a message to their 
souls because it is spoken by human lips. If in a 
passion to hear some voice, though it is only his own, 
he shouts aloud, then bread and water and a bare 
plank in a cell below await him. In their craving for 
human intercourse, the prisoners invent and practise 
a language of signals by taps on their cell-walls, like a 
Morse code. If you go into a cell, and tap so, immedi- 
ately on both sides the signals begin, as you can hear 



THE LANGUAGE OF TAPS 283 

death-head moths ticking o' night in a press-bed in a 
country kitchen. The language of taps is forbidden ; 
so is conversation conducted (as out of their necessity, 
prisoners have discovered it can be) along the pipes 
that heat their cells ; but both are practised, which 
makes a weak point in this precious elaborate system. 
The rotunda has an inside floor space of fifty-three 
metres diameter, paved with stone flags, thickly strewn 
with fine white sand to deaden the footsteps of the 
warders. There is a spacious dome, thirty-five metres 
high, with a ventilating lantern of glass, and clean 
fresh wooden panels in the spandrels. Undoubtedly 
the prison is airy and fresh. In the centre of the floor 
there is an office of administration, somewhat like a 
cabman's shelter, with a little observation tower on top. 
Round the walls of the rotunda are four balconies of 
iron, reached from the floor by iron staircases, and on 
these give the cells, 208 in all. Each cell contains 
thirty cubic metres ; in it the convict sleeps and eats 
and does his work, unless his work be that of the 
blacksmith, in which case he has a working-cell next 
his living cell. His bed folds down against the wall; 
his food is passed in to him by a sliding shelf in 
the door, and he eats at a little shelf in the wall ; 
there is a little wooden stool on which to rest and 
work. Hot-air pipes heat him. By day he gets 
light from one of the windows that pierce the outer 
wall of the rotunda, and there is electric light for 
night, from sunset until 10 o'clock. For his work, for 
which the prison direction contracts with some private 



284 'S HERTOGENBOSCH 

trader in the town, the convict is paid a trifle ; if 
he is a good workman he can earn as much as £^ 
a year. If he is well-behaved, he can expend some of 
that in the kitchen once a week in eggs and milk and 
other such luxuries. His ordinary fare is brown bread 
at breakfast and supper (0.75 kilogram daily), with 
coffee at one or other, and once a day he has a hot 
meal, generally of potatoes or peas and beans, but of 
barley soup or barley porridge once a week, and once 
a week of meat. If he has any demand to make, he 
rings an electric bell, and by a simple mechanism the 
warder in the tower is informed in what section a con- 
vict is signalling, and can pick out at once the partic- 
ular cell from a disk that falls outside of it when the 
bell is pressed. The cooking is done by steam in vats 
in the kitchen, on the walls of which hang copper 
utensils bright as we expect such to be in Holland. 
The prisoner himself is washed when he enters, and 
once a month while he remains. His bedclothes are 
washed fortnightly. And of course, to make the course 
complete, the Bertillon system has been introduced, to 
the very thumb mark, — at least, if the prisoner is to 
be immured for over six months, and has reached the 
age of twenty-three, after which time, it is supposed, 
his measurements will not change. 

In one angle of the yard, next the rotunda, stands 
the church, — Netherlands Reformed or Roman 
Catholic, which you will. Now it is Protestant; you. 
pull a string, a curtain withdraws from the high altar, 
and it is CathoHc. The cages are in ascending double 



THE CHURCH IN THE PRISON 285 

rows ; those in front entered from the front, the rear 
ones from the rear. Five or six double rows of caged 
unfortunates, witli warders seated on httle stools on 
top, face the clergyman, whom Heaven help ! 

In the oblong yard, at the other end from the 
church, are the larger cells for exercise. In each of 
the two angles stands the warder's observation box, 
and in quarter circles round it are ranged the exer- 
cise stalls, — fifteen brick sheds like those in Zoological 
Gardens in which bears are allowed to take their tub, 
with iron bars in front. The prisoner looks across 
the potato patch to the warder in his corner, but he 
cannot see his neighbours. The outermost men might 
strike a line of vision along the arc of the quarter- 
circle, into each other's sheds, were it not that 
wooden screens are flung out at points to shut off 
their line of view. Nothing is forgotten. 

This is the system of the isolated cell as prac- 
tised in the newest and most perfected prison in the 
country. "What do you do with your insane?" is 
the natural question to ask of the doctor who is 
showing us over the prison, with the courtesy and 
pleasure in giving information which almost unfail- 
ingly the Dutchman exhibits. Well, it appears that, 
contrary to what one would have expected, the system 
is not productive of insanity. The insane are not in 
greater proportion here than in any other random 
collection of men, the doctor says ; you must re- 
member, he adds, that crime itself is the product of 
insanity. If a prisoner does show a tendency to 



286 'S HERTOGENBOSCH 

mental breakdown under the treatment, then he is 
sent to one of the long-term prisons, like that at 
Leeuwarden, where convicts who have been isolated 
for five years work out the remainder of their sen- 
tences, doing hard labour in gangs. But it is seldom 
that that is necessary, I am assured. The figures on 
which this estimate of the proportion of insane is 
based are somewhat misleading. All sentences of 
five years and under, even twenty-four hours for 
brawling, are worked out on the same system, in the 
same prisons; and in most cases in Breda, when we 
visited it, they were too light to be likely to affect the 
mental condition of the prisoners. Still, the testimony 
was firm that the proportion of insane in these prisons 
is not above the normal. The true explanation no 
doubt is that the system is a partial failure, that it is 
impossible to enforce complete isolation. It may be 
admitted at once that no one without experience in 
the treatment of prisoners has any conception of the 
evils resulting from allowing them more free inter- 
course. The principle of isolation is right, no doubt. 
But certainly the impression made upon one by the 
visit to the prison at Breda was that the system was 
elaborated there to a degree that made it beyond 
measure degrading and inhuman. 



UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 

FROM 's Hertogenbosch to Utrecht is a railway 
journey of about thirty miles, which, earlier in 
this book, and in the glow of impressions that pales 
a little on reflection, I described as being in spring 
one of the most beautiful in the world. Well, in 
spring it is beautiful. And, whatsoever the time of 
year, make the journey by daylight. Then, as we 
cross the Maas and the Waal and the Lek, by great 
viaducts with arches that leap over dry fields if it is 
summer, and that are reflected in water if it is winter, 
we find a more vivid story of the fight with the waters 
in the carriage window than in any printed page. 
Indeed, as the reader has been told already, there 
is scarce any peculiarity of landscape, or variety in 
the conditions of life arising out of geographical 
situation, which the traveller expects to see in Hol- 
land that he will not find somewhere or other in 
Utrecht, Gelderland, or Overysel. Before exploring 
the city of Utrecht itself, which is by far the most 
interesting place in them, let us make a flying visit 
round these eastern provinces. 

We double back upon the railway route from 
's Hertogenbosch, and alight at the village of Gel- 
dermalsen, from where another line runs eastward 



288 UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 

through the Betuwe to Nymegen. Geldermalsen Hes 
on the pretty Httle river, the Linge, and is well worth 
a visit, especially when, as now, it is smothered in 
cherry blossom. Later on, when the fruit is ripe, 
the cherry orchards are an excuse for one of the 
many little festivities of simple Dutch people. Parties 
are made up for a cherry feast. They go to an 
orchard, make an arrangement Vv^ith the farmer, and 
having paid their money are allowed to take their 
choice, and eat as many cherries as they can pick. 
I am reminded of many a happy hour on an upland 
farm-garden at home, when by an act of grace vve 
boys were let loose among the gooseberry bushes, 
with no restriction upon our desires save that there 
was to be no pocketing. But old manners and cus- 
toms are rapidly dying out in Holland. In one of 
the orchards in Geldermalsen here, this forenoon, a 
farm-labourer and two lads, his sons probably, are 
taking their siesta. Beside the man, I observe, is a 
pair of sabots which he has kicked off for comfort, 
but the lads are wearing leather boots. Even from 
the Betuwe, that seems to prophesy, the old-fashioned 
wooden shoes will soon disappear. 

East from Geldermalsen is the great Gelderland 
horse-breeding land, with its " head-place," as a coun- 
tryman tells me, at Tiel. Horse-flesh is the talk of the 
countryside. The landlord of the inn where I drank 
coffee turned the conversation upon it immediately, 
and now the third-class carriage in which we are 
travelling to Nymegen is full of cigar-smoke and thq 






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290 UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 

points of a peerd. No horsey man (except, I am told, 
the very latest and most up-to-date of the class) talks 
about dcpaard. All the farmers in the district through 
which we are travelling breed horses, to be sold ulti- 
mately at the August market at Tiel. The finest 
animals go to France and to England, the ruck to 
Germany. One of my neighbours in the carriage says 
that the very best five-year-olds bring a thousand guil- 
ders, and the more ordinary beasts a little over half 
that price ; but this opinion starts a heated discussion, 
from which I gather that there has been a sharp drop 
in prices recently. Competition, too, it appears, has 
been cutting down the profits of the fruit export from 
the district, and of the vegetable culture farther east. 
Thus is the journey to Nymegen beguiled by the re- 
hearsal of the Betuwe farmer's grievances. 

Nymegen is not a typical Dutch town. When we 
get clear of the large houses and hotels near the sta- 
tion, and penetrate to the heart of the old city, — for 
it is very old and very quaint, — we find ourselves look- 
ing up a steep street that leads to the Church of St. 
Stephen, and realise by the refreshment we derive 
from the sight how, all unconsciously, we have been 
bored by the flat country, in which we have been 
spending the last few days. Built upon seven hills, 
Nymegen cannot be typically Dutch. Traces of the 
influence of Charlemagne still remain in it. The old- 
est object in the city, probably the oldest in the whole 
country, is the scanty ruin of the Valkenhof, — the hof 
or palace on the Waal, where Charles the Great and 



DUTCH WOMEN 291 

Frederick Barbarossa held their court, when they 
came to hunt in the Rijkswald close by. The presence 
of the Kaisers is commemorated still in the names of 
curfew and hotel and plein. But the feeling of the 
city to-day is distressingly modern. Its beautiful and 
bracing environs have caused it to become a favourite 
residential town, and a family resort in the spring and 
summer. In an expedition from the town one Sunday 
afternoon, our way lay along a road, high above the 
Waal, dotted with hotels and pensions and summer 
houses, and crowded with pedestrians and holiday- 
makers of all sorts and conditions, and especially with 
a species of cyclist, — a particularly objectionable type 
of the dandy scorcher, which, I am glad to say, I have 
never seen before or since. The many pretty women 
and young girls in it, however, were the most noticeable 
thing about this Nymegen crowd. Pretty women are 
not very often met with in Holland. " Ah ! You must 
go to The Hague," say the Dutch. I have been to 
The Hague. One reads frequently of the handsome 
women of North-Holland and Friesland, with dairy- 
maid colour; and it is impossible to deny them the 
possession of handsome, pliant figures, without any 
tendency to embonpoint, such as popular conception 
associates with Dutch women. No doubt the wide 
breeches of the fishermen, and an ambition among 
their wives to wear manifold petticoats (unsatisfied, 
I am given to understand, with fewer than thirteen), 
carried by means of a bag of sand round the waist, 
have given rise to the general idea of the enormity of 



292 



UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 



the Dutch a parte poste. The most handsome faces 
among the peasant women are apt to be dull and inani- 




mate, and the complexion goes early. It was in their 
complexion chiefly that the beauty of these Nymegen 
girls lay. 

It is not for its holiday crowds and pretty women, 



ARNHEM 293 

however, that I remember Nymegen, but for the old 
grey part of the city lying by the side of the Waal. I 
can think of no old quarter of any old city more full of 
romantic suggestion. In order to get a better view of 
Nymegen on this old side of it, we choose steamer in- 
stead of train to carry us to Arnhem, and enjoy an 
early sail up the Waal and down the Rhine, with the 
finely wooded country about Cleves lighted by the 
morning sun ever in sight. Even as, on leaving it by 
river, we see Nymegen at its best, — so now we see 
Arnhem at its finest by approaching it on the water 
side. But Arnhem is to be a disappointment. It is a 
city of great age; though a communicative traveller 
on the boat, when pointing out to me the village of 
Huissen, on the other side of the Rhine, told me that 
the old direction for Arnhem was ''Arnhem, by Huis- 
sen." It possesses buildings of considerable interest, 
and the most^'beautiful environs of any place in Hol- 
land. With the exception of Tilburg, it is the Dutch 
town that has grown most in recent years. It is a gay, 
fashionable, military city, where the " nabobs " settle 
down when they return from the East: the most at- 
tractive town in Holland to live in, it may be, as its 
inhabitants declare, but the most barren of interest it 
certainly is to the visitor who is unsatisfied with any- 
thing not peculiarly Dutch. In this it differs from the 
three typically charming and picturesque towns that 
come next on our route : Zutphen, notable for its 
sieges and ships, and above all, to me, for one friendly 
and hospitable household in it; Deventer, where the 



294 UTRFXHT, AND THE EAST 

carpets and the koek come from, and Terburg was bur- 
gom.aster, and painted a picture of his Council which 
hangs in the Stadhuis ; and ZwoUe, Terburg's birth- 
phice, the capital of Overysel, with a sleek and com- 
fortable population, well-stated in life. 

But as I wish to see a more modern Holland than 
is to be found in these towns of ancient peace, we will 
strike eastward to the seats of the so-called Twente 
Industry. In the district of Twente, in an earlier day, 
a great deal of the land was under flax. There were 
weavers in every village, and gradually there sprang 
up a considerable industry which received a fresh 
spurt when the Twente towns gave asylum to many 
Flemish weavers who had fled from the Baptist per- 
secution. In time, the handlooms disappeared before 
steam, and a company that was established at Goor^ 
under the direction of Thomas Ainsworth, did much 
to increase the output in the district. ATter the sepa- 
ration of Belgium, which had provided Holland with 
most of the calico she required, cotton-spinning en- 
croached upon flax-spinning, until to-day flax has 
nearly disappeared, and the industr}^ is almost entirely 
one of cotton. It is an interesting history, of which we 
hope to learn many details in Twente itself. In that, 
however, we are disappointed, and we find also that 
in electing to come to Almelo we have hit upon a 
town, or a village, — it has some four thousand inhabi- 
tants only, — which is likely to leave upon us too 
bright an impression of a Dutch industrial centre. 
We ought to have gone to Enschede, it seems, — a 



ALMELO 295 

rough and rowdy place, say the workmen in Almelo 
with whom I converse, with greater poverty than is 
to be found among themselves, or indeed, almost any- 
where else in Holland save in Limburg. Possibly the 
Almelo workman exaggerates the depraved condition 
of Enschede, because so much is done by certain of 
the masters in his own town to make its condition 
comfortable in comparison. Possibly he exaggerates 
— or at any rate the workman with whom I spoke 
longest on these matters — the benefits of which he 
is the recipient. In one mill we found bathrooms for 
the use of the workers, and of others in the town on 
payment of a small fee. There were elementary and 
sewing schools, also, and a music-corps, and I gathered 
that a committee or board of workmen managed 
several institutions of an educational and charitable 
kind connected with the mill. We paid a visit to a 
Mechanics' Institute, presented to the town by one 
of the manufacturers, a fine building with several acres 
of ground round it, containing a lecture and enter- 
tainment hall, in which, also, science and art classes 
meet. These and many other proofs of a philanthropic 
spirit among the masters I saw and heard of, and I 
carried away the pleasantest recollections of an after- 
noon spent with an intelligent and widely-read work- 
man. But I did not feel that anything I saw or heard 
was a guide to the social condition of the working- 
classes of Almelo even, far less of Twente. The town, 
it appears, has gained the reputation of being the 
headquarters of Socialism, owing to a demonstration 



296 UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 

a year or two ago when the young queen and her 
mother were passing through it. The workmen who 
were our guides seemed to think that that black mark 
against Almelo must be wiped off, and assured us 
again and again that SociaHsm was on the dechne. 
But that was the only thing they were very definite 
about. 

From Zwolle to Utrecht, our way lies through the 
Veluwe, the land of wood and waste ground, thinly 
populated, a white spot on the map. Several agri- 
cultural colonies have come into existence here; one, 
at Barneveldt, some two hundred and twenty acres in 
extent, of which fully the half is under cultivation, 
belongs to the Salvation Army, and last wintef gave 
work and shelter to about thirty destitute men. Pri- 
vate enterprise is also engaged in important, experi- 
ments in planting the sandy wastes, traces of which 
the traveller can see on the railway journey from 
Hardewijk to Amersfoort. It is not unlikely that 
in the future the reclaiming energy of the Dutch 
will exercise itself chiefly on this heath-planting. In 
earlier days, the Veluwe was famous for its hunting. 
Up to thirty years ago, falconry was carried on over 
its wide open heaths ; especially near the royal palace 
of Het Loo, which, like the other palace at Soesdijk, 
farther east near Baarn, was originally a hunting lodge. 
All over these eastern provinces there is good sport; 
and the reader will not be surprised to learn that the 
Dutch sportsman, though modern methods have their 




In the Wood. 
From a drawing by Anton Mauve. 



298 UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 

temptations for him, is for the most part a jager, a 
hunter, still, and something of a naturalist as well, who 
considers the finding of the game, and not the shoot- 
ing of it, the better part of the sport. See this hunter 
of the old school setting out for the day after an early 
breakfast. Considerations of appearance weigh lightly 
with him. An easy coat above a woollen jerkin, a 
wide-awake hat, trousers tucked into the boots, and 
leggings to the knees, — that is the costume you will 
frequently see alongside of shooting suits cut in the 
newest English fashion. The Dutch hunter, however, 
prefers to go out alone, accompanied only by his 
servant and his dog. The gun over his shoulder, 
though a serviceable weapon, is not of the latest pat- 
tern. The bag which the man carries contains no 
elaborate luncheon; cold tea, a little gin, perhaps, the 
inevitable buttered roll and cheese, a slice of cold 
tongue, — that is all. Pine-woods and meadows and 
■moor and sandy hillocks lie on his ground. If a 
broad ditch intervenes, the servant has his polstok at 
hand, — a stout pole, some twelve feet in length, by 
means of which, if you have the knack, wide water- 
ways can be crossed. As long as there is light, the 
sportsman continues the hunt, working hard for each 
item in the bag, which generally is heavy and mixed 
when home is reached. 

We are nearing Utrecht now,' and can scarce miss 
seeing the fortresses that rise every here and there 
from the plain around it. It does not appear, indeed, 
that everyone recognises them as fortresses. I re- 



THE SCHEME OF INUNDATION 299 

member travelling between Zeist and Utrecht in a rail- 
way carriage in which was an English lady with her 
two daughters. The girls appealed to her to know 
what the green mounds were that we were pass- 
ing. "My dears," she said to them, "these are 
graves." She had some dim recollection, I suppose, 
of reading in Baedeker about the hiinnebeddeii. These 
fortresses belong to the first line of defence, the 
NieiLwe HollandscJie Waterliniey — which stretches from 
Utrecht northward along the east bank of the Vecht 
by Nieuwersluis and Weesp to the Zuider Zee at 
Naarden and Muiden, and southward to Vreeswijk on 
the Lek and to Gorkum on the Maas. The fortresses 
in the second and main line of defence are concen- 
trated upon Amsterdam. In the event of an invasion 
on the land side, the garrisons on the frontiers will 
gain time for the inundation at the first line : that is 
all that is expected of them. For the real defence of 
Holland is her ubiquitous and mortal enemy — water. 
In centuries past, the sea from which she snatched 
bare life bred the men who made world-wide conquests 
for her. It was the sea, allowed its way across her 
rich pastures, that saved her from the arms of Spain. 
And were she put to the pinch to-day, as she was 
when Valdez sat down against Leiden, inundation 
would be her only possible safety. To the east of this 
Nieiiwe WaUr/inie the land slopes upw^ards, and in time 
of invasion the base of the acclivity would be flooded, 
and the progress of the enemy barred. If a physio- 
graphical map of the country be studied carefully, it 



300 UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 

will be seen that there is a weak spot in the line 
of defence at the high ground about Houten, to the 
south of Utrecht. Tlie scheme of inundation provides 
as far as possible for flooding by fresh water, so that 
the land may not suffer more than is necessary. The 
water would be brought to such a depth that neither 
wading nor the passage of big vessels would be pos- 
sible ; and as certain portions of the immersed country 
require less water than others, regulating reservoirs 
would be used. The dams at these reservoirs and the 
railways are so many highroads for an enemy, and 
they are commanded by fortresses; and the sluices, 
of course, will have to be kept in the hands of the 
defenders. All these things are in the scheme. The 
scheme provides, also, for the blowing up of the bridges 
across the rivers; though whether there would be 
found the resolution sufficient for the demolition of 
such a viaduct as that across the Lek at Kuilemburg is 
doubted by many Hollanders. The stranger might 
live a year in the country and never guess at all this 
preparation. It is still another example of the value 
to Holland of a foot or two of water, and of how her 
great works are hidden from the eye. 

In the provinces in which we have been making this 
flying tour, however, there is nothing more picturesque 
or more interesting than the city of Utrecht itself. It 
is encircled by the singel, the old fosse, round the 
inner side of which runs a broad path, the site of 
the ancient ramparts, portions of which still remain. 
Within, the city is intersected by canals, — numerous 



THE OUDE GRACHT 301 

branches of the Kromme, or Crooked Rhine, — which 
at one time evidently was in greatly larger volume than 
at present, and followed various courses that have been 
dammed and mined and bridged throughout the centu- 
ries, the river being changed in the construction of the 
city, and itself modifying that construction. All this, 
however, is too general. Canals intersect all Dutch 
towns. But the Oude Gracht, the main intersecting 
canal of Utrecht, has a peculiarity which, so far as I 
know, is found nowhere else, — and it is this. There are, 
on the sides of the Oude Gracht, dwellings below the 
level of the street proper. From it you descend to the 
water, by two great steps, as it were, the fall between 
them forming the front of these dwellings, and the 
second step being a narrower strip of causeway at their 
doors. The explanation of this is that there used to 
stand upon the Oude Gracht, — some of them are 
still standing, — very large and high houses, town 
mansions of the country families in the province, 
which were built upon arched cellars, to afford them 
secure foundations. These cellars are the dwellings 
that give upon the canal-side. Most of them are used 
as stores, now, it is true ; but there remain some that 
are inhabited, and by their show of white curtains in 
the windows, and flower-pots on the sills, picture what 
used to be. 

In earlier days in most Dutch towns, the streets 
skirting the canals were lined on the waterside by low 
parapet walls, upon which the folk sat and chatted 
after the familiar fashion of our own fishing-villages. 



302 UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 

In front of the houses, too, there were seats (as for 
that part there are here and there still), and these and 
the ground on which they stood, often on elevated 
granite blocks, belonged to the owners of the houses. 
A little out-jutting rail divided the properties. In 
course of time, in the larger and busier towns, as traf- 
fic increased, and space became valuable, the seats 
disappeared. But often the little separate rails remain, 
sometimes the granite slabs ; and such " plainstanes " as 
there are, are strips of brick set on end, on a level with, 
and encroaching upon, the '' crown o' the caus'way." 
There, we have the history of the eminently uncom- 
fortable streets — not of Utrecht only, but of all Dutch 
towns. This natural discomfort of the streets is made 
infinitely greater by the coachmen. More reckless 
driving than you find in Holland does not exist, I 
think, anywhere in the world, — not even in Paris. 
The French cabby sweeps round corners with a mali- 
cious gaiety, but the Dutchman pounds- through. The 
one rule of the road known to Dutch koetsiers is that 
the foot-passenger must get out of it, and this he has 
to do as best he can by slipping up those railed- 
off slabs or dodging into the shelter of shop-doors. 
To one accustomed to London streets, the effect of 
this on perambulation is similar to that caused by 
scorchers on the wheel. In Utrecht, to make mat- 
ters worse, the city is traversed by tram-car lines 
which, instead of lying along the streets in a humane 
and orderly fashion, wind through them from side to 
side, like the track a horse seeks when going up a 



AN ECCLESIASTICAL CITY 303 

brae. This of course is to ease the car's passage 
round the corners, which is narrow and jolting withal; 
but the consequence is infinitely disconcerting, and 
the harsh clang of the warning bells maddening to the 
nerves. Were the traffic carried on in the streets 
mainly, life in Dutch towns would be shortened by 
years. But the canals are the great highways of com- 
merce, and the water deadens, or rather harmonises, 
the sounds. The silent motion of the barges, the cool- 
ness, the play of colour, and the sombre shadows over 
the bustle deep down on the canal-side, act on one 
soothingly. 

Utrecht is not a city of "sights," so called. An 
Archiepiscopal Museum and the Museum Kunstliefde, 
both of them containing pictures ascribed to the 
vagabond Jan Scorel, and the latter several genuine 
examples of his work; a town museum with the 
model of a Dutch interior of earlier date; now and 
then an interesting and unpresuming exhibition of 
modern pictures, or of arts and crafts, — these are all. 
The truly interesting Utrecht is a creation of the imag- 
ination, and imagination peoples it with ecclesiastics. 
The Dom tower, rising from its centre, commanding it 
and half a province besides, testifies to the power of 
the clergy. To understand the city rightly in its 
plan, even to-day, you must conceive of it as a city of 
churches, around which clustered in close squares the 
houses and cloisters of the clergy. Janskerkhof, 
Pieterskerkhof, Munsterkerkhof, are examples of the 
squares so formed. Once they were completely shut 



304 



UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 



off from the rest of the city, — some of them even were 
walled in and moated within the encircling canal; and 
it was at a comparatively recent date that the many 
streets broke in upon them. Let the visitor who is suffi- 
ciently interested find his way to the Voetsiussteegje, 




A Town Canal. 



in the northeast corner of the Munsterkerkhof, pres- 
ently joining it with the Pieterskerkhof, and consider 
it as the only inlet, and he will get an impression of the 
plan and appearance of the city in earlier times. 

At one side of the square rises the Dom tower, 
remarkable in little save its height, its singleness, 



UTRECHT CATHEDRAL 305 

and its detachment. Unlike most Gothic churches, 
Utrecht Cathedral was designed with this one tower 
only, and it, accordingly, of the unusual height of 360 
feet. Or we may believe, in perfect accord with his- 
tory, that, as a tower of great height was required 
for spying purposes by archbishops surrounded by 
enemies, one such was as many as they could under- 
take. The tower's detachment shows that the cathe- 
dral was beyond their powers a little. From the choir, 
which is all that is left of the church, — sadly disfig- 
ured in its whitewashed interior, — to the Dom tower, 
there is a great open space, the heart and centre of the 
square, defiled by foot-passengers and traversed by the 
wretched tram-lines of which lament was made before. 
Now, though before the great havoc-playing storm of 
1674, which swept down I know not how many spires 
like ninepins, the tower and the choir were joined in 
one completed cathedral, it seems most likely that the 
connecting nave was of wood only. During the two 
hundred and more years in which the cathedral has 
stood in its present ridiculous state of dismemberment, 
the square itself has changed greatly, and always for 
the worse. The new university, on the southeast side, 
was needed, if we are to judge by the entrance and 
staircase of the former university which still exist, 
enclosed in a corner of the present one ; but the old 
buildings connected with the church, in which it made 
a home, must have been in better keeping with their 
neighbours in the square, and were furnished no doubt 

in a less sumptuous style of upholstery, more in accord- 

20 



3o6 UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 

ance with our ideas of a teaching university. Under 
the changes in the university, these old buildings have 
undergone a continual and curious transformation. 
And so it is on all sides of the square ; for example, 
the old archbishop's palace, on the south, is now a 
coffee-house. 

Besides being a great ecclesiastical city, of which 
many evidences still exist besides its plan and its 
churches, Utrecht had a period of commercial great- 
ness. Its position in the centre of the country, and 
on the Rhine, made it one of the great markets of 
the Middle Ages. To-day, however, its commercial 
character is entirely lost. Utrecht is probably the 
most typical learned and formal and conservative 
town in Holland. The university dominates it: the 
university, not the new university building which 
hides itself modestly — and indeed it is not very 
handsome — in the corner of the Dom Plein. You 
are not long in the city without being aware of the 
presence of the students, generally bowling along the 
streets in open carriages, which appears to be their 
favourite amusement. Every special occasion is 
seized by them as an excuse for going for a drive. 
The student who has taken his Doctor's degree has 
his thesis printed and bound; and, seated in a landau, 
— it might be called a chariot, — driven by a coach- 
man and attended by lackeys (who are fellow-students 
generally) gorgeously attired, he delivers his valuable 
work at the houses of professors and friends. 

Dutch universities, like the Scots, are not residential. 



DUTCH STUDENTS 307 

The students live with their famihes or in lodgings in 
the town, each of them a link of interest, or of self-in- 
terest at any rate, between the university and the citi- 
zens. In some of the Dutch university towns, however, 
the relations between Town and Gown have long 
been strained, and in Utrecht they have become so in 
recent years. For that and similar changes, the 
spread of Socialism is a reason that comes readily. 
to many Dutch lips. At the most, there is only a 
growth of Radical feeling. The burghers, or some of 
them, have begun to resent the extravagance of the 
students, which they compare with their own straitened 
or frugal mode of living. In Holland, as in other 
countries, the students are apt to be spendthrift, and 
they appear to be more so than they really are 
because the rest of the community, as we have seen, 
are so orderly in their expenses. Many of them no 
doubt leave the university with a load of debt round 
their necks which it takes years to cast off. Whether 
their extravagance is the reason or not, the students 
in Utrecht are no longer allowed the licence they 
once were. Even their processions are interdicted at 
times lest they should lead to disturbances with the 
populace. 

With the society of the towns, many of the students 
are on an intimate footing; but there are some who 
hold aloof, ostensibly with the view of preserving their 
liberty of action. The Dutch student leads a singularly 
untrammelled life. For him there is no Chapel and 
no Gate. He does not even come under an obligation 



3o8 UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 

to attend any classes. There are students who spend 
years at the university without entering a class-room. 
Generally these are young fellows of private fortune, 
studying in the law, without any intention of prac- 
tising their profession later, who look upon the years 
at the university as a time for gaiety and pleasure 
merely. There are fewer such now than there used 
to be. The gymnasium system has had the effect of 
sending lads to the university later in life and presum- 
ably with more wisdom than formerly; it is admitted 
that most of the students work well. But many who 
work well, and take a brilliant degree, are irregular in 
their attendance on lectures. There are easier and 
quicker roads than through the class-room to the 
knowledge necessary for the examinations. Law 
students go regularly to lectures for two or three 
years only out of the six or seven of their course. 
There is the same freedom in the other Faculties, 
but for several reasons it is not so generally taken 
advantage of. The thorough practical knowledge 
demanded before a medical degree is granted, can 
only be attained by attendance on the demonstrations 
of the professors. Theological students, again, are 
constrained to attend classes more regularly than their 
fellows by a sense of honour as well as by the instiga- 
tion of prudence. They pay less, and might be sus- 
pected of seeking to live their student's life on false 
pretences did they not follow the classes closely. 
They have to keep in view, also, the good conduct 
leaving-certificate without which advancement in their 



THE STUDENTS' CORPS 309 

profession might be difficult. But between professors 
and students there are few ties, and the few there are, 
are being weakened. There used to be a general 
custom among the professors of giving a *'Tea" to 
which the students were invited, but these mild enter- 
tainments are disappearing, and where they linger, 
attendance on them is as slack as on the lectures, 
save, perhaps, when the examinations are drawing 
near. The Dutch student is his own master, and for 
what he does is accountable to no one, except his 
parents, it may be, and the canton judge, if in his 
pursuit of liberty he has had the misfortune to come 
into conflict with the police. 

No account of Dutch university life is complete 
that does not mention the Corps, in which these scat- 
tered and freedom-loving students, otherwise united 
under no authority, are in a manner held together. 
There is a Students' Corps in each university, and all 
of them have very much the same constitution. They 
comprise all the students save a few, the boeven, the 
knaves, they are called, who cannot afford to pay the 
necessary subscription, or shrink from undergoing 
the rough discipline of the novitiate^ At the head of 
the corps, to administer its afl"airs and attend to all 
its interests, is a Senate, or College, composed of a 
Rector, a Secretary, and three members, elected an- 
nually, generally from among the students of four 
years' standing. A member of the Corps is entitled 
to be elected to the Corps Club and to any of its 
various social and sports societies. The Corps, in 
fact, is the heart and spring of student life. 



310 



UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 



The novice, or '' green," has to endure for three or 
four weeks a severe test of his spirit. The first thing 
he does is to leave his name with the Senate, after 
which he starts upon a round of calls upon the mem- 
bers of the Corps. The reception accorded him is of 




The Dog in the Cart. 



a kind less agreeable to himself than to his enter- 
tainer, who discovers a painstaking interest in all his 
doings, in his religious views, his morals, his scholar- 
ship, the various members of his family. Before the 
interview ends, the ** green " has to get a signature to 
his visiting book, which is examined by the Senate 



THE MASQUERADE 311 

once a week. From early morning until ten at night, 
he is at the beck and call of any member of the Corps 
who may be feeling in need of a little entertainment, 
and with the best grace he can muster he has to 
submit to any usage, howsoever insulting, so long as 
it falls short of physical constraint. It is a bad time 
for molly-coddles and bumptious fellows. In this 
common discipline, however, the " greens " of each 
year are united in an informal body, with certain 
rights which are jealously preserved. One of them is 
the sanctity of their social meetings, from which any 
old member who invades them is expelled by officials 
whose title of Uitsmijters is exactly translated by 
'' Chuckers-out." When the novitiate is ended, the 
" greens " are formally installed by the Rector in all 
the privileges of membership, at a special meeting of 
the Corps ; and they too, of course, drive through the 
streets, decked in the colours of their Faculty, and 
hold a feast of fraternisation at the Club. 

A summer or two ago, I witnessed a pretty pageant 
with which the Students' Corps of Utrecht celebrated 
the 260th year of their university. It was during the 
week of feasting, referred to earlier, in which we dis- 
covered Dutchmen shaken out of their accustomed 
formality. On this occasion, at least, ''Town" fol- 
lowed "■ Gown " into very high jinks. For a week the 
people of Utrecht were just a little bit "■ daft." The 
receptions and orations of the opening day were 
caught up in a whirl of concert and garden-party, 
reunion dinner and bal champetre, and the feast-week 



512 UTRECHT, AND THE EAST 

ended with a burst of horseplay more boisterous than 
we should tolerate. The crown of all these university 
celebrations is a masquerade, representing some his- 
toric scene, and on this occasion it was the Tourna- 
ment in Vienna in 1560, given by Maximilian, King of 
Bohemia, in honour of his guest, the Duke of Bavaria. 
It happened that at that time Utrecht had many stu- 
dents of great wealth, and this pageant was specially 
splendid in consequence. Some two hundred students 
took part in it, half of them representing historical per- 
sonages, the others their heralds and bodyguards, and 
all of them, in armour and trappings and costumes, 
careful reproductions of the originals. For the whole 
week they played their mimic parts. Men-at-arms 
stood at every corner, knights in armour pranced in 
every street. During that time the student who repre- 
sented the king held his court, dined in state, with a 
hundred knights around him, watched the dance from 
his throne with the beauty of his choice seated beside 
him, and received the obeisance of the citizens (punc- 
tilious on the part of the professors) when he rode out 
with his retinue. On the field of the tournament even he 
flew his colours over his pavilion, set beside that where 
the orange waved above the young and sweet-looking 
Wilhelmina, and in the name of the Koning his mock 
majesty's heralds announced to the real sovereign that 
the tournay was at an end. I wonder if the young fel- 
low felt any decline when Sunday morning came, and 
he had to step out from all the pomp and circum- 
stance of royalty? There were signs at any rate that 



THE MASQUERADE 313 

the coat of mail sat as heavily upon him as the cares 
of state are said to do. And, speaking from the spec- 
tator's point of view, one never quite lost the sense of 
a mimic show, — except once, when the procession 
passed through the Maliebaan in the darkening to 
the music of pipes and tambours, when the ostrich 
plumes of the knights reared against the overhanging 
branches, and their armour glanced in the light of the 
torches, in the smoky gloom of which the mimicry was 
hid for a moment, and the pageant of the sixteenth 
century realised. 



GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

IN a village just across the borders of Drente, there 
is an inn dining-room that gives upon a pleasant 
garden. In the garden are a bed of tulips, some hens, 
more or less of the Dorking breed, and a fox terrier 
with an unusually long tail. The Dorkings are circum- 
spect in avoiding the flower-bed, except when the 
long-tailed terrier makes a dash at them, which he 
does every few minutes, sending them flying with de- 
structive wings among the tulips ; whereupon the 
company in the garden is joined by a jolly and excit- 
able old Dutchman who is distracted between the de- 
sire to reach the cause, the terrier, and a wish to bind 
up the broken consequences in the tulip-bed. During 
these excursions of his I am left sitting at the dining- 
room table with my finger on the map of the northern 
provinces, holding on to the loose end of a demonstra- 
tion of their character in which my Dutch friend has 
been interrupted. Possibly because it was delivered 
in these exciting conditions, I have never forgotten 
that evening's demonstration. " Butter on one side, 
peat on the other," he would say as he returned from 
pursuit of the dog. " You see Meppel, here — a junc- 
tion. From Meppel and Heereveen and Drachten 
and Dokkum — put your finger on them — the land 



THE CHARITY COLONIES 315 

begins to fall away to the sea. All meadows, sir, and 
the railway line from Meppel to Leeuwarden runs 
through them. Now this other line from Meppel to 
Groningen : observe how it runs. Hoogeveen, Assen, 
Groningen, — sand and heath. Butter on the one — 
d — n the dog!" But I have learned the lesson: 
Butter on the one side, peat on the other. It is a 
capital working direction for the traveller in the 
northern provinces. 

As our first choice is peat, we will take the railway 
route to Groningen. But before starting by way of it 
for the fen colonies in the northeast, let us visit two 
colonies of another kind upon the sandy moorland be- 
tween the butter and the peat. The first of these are 
the agricultural estates of a private charitable associa- 
tion, the Maatschappij van Weldadigheid, which lie 
almost due north from Meppel. I take the train to 
Steenwijk, the first station on the Leeuwarden line 
that leads into the meadow-lands, and from there 
drive four or five miles to the entrance of the colonies. 
On leaving Steenwijk, we pass a low-peat bed with 
men busy in it extracting the peat. The ground be- 
longs to the town, and the peat upon it is sold to pri- 
vate persons or to a private company,- — in this case, 
the coachman tells us, to some of the townspeople, — 
who work it. When the peat is all removed, the 
ground will revert to the town. Our way lies along a 
canal, into which the country beside it is drained : we 
can see the mills busy here and there; but many of 
the fields are wet, many of them completely sub- 



3i6 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

merged. In the depressed condition of agriculture, 
the farmers are probably finding the cost of the drain- 
ing operations too heavy. We pass into the colony 
over a neat drawbridge, and find ourselves at the house 
of the Director, which is flanked by oaks and pines. 
The Director is not at home, but I am fortunate 
enough to meet Mr. Bleeker, the head of the Horticul- 
tural School, who most courteously offers to drive 
with me over the colony, and show me all that is to be 
seen. 

But first of all we visit his school, which is just 
opposite the residence of the Director. Five or six 
acres of garden lie round the handsome house which, 
like the Schools of Forestry and Agriculture elsewhere 
on the estate, were built by Mr. Gerard Adriaan van 
Swieten, and are called by his name. It is a beautiful 
morning, so the school-room is empty, and the lads are 
busy at work outside in the garden and orchard and 
hot-houses. Mr. Bleeker tells me he has twenty-six 
boys at present under his instruction. Before they 
come to him they have passed through one or other of 
the public schools in the colonies, and when they are 
ready to leave him and can earn their own living, there 
will be no difficulty in finding them situations. As 
with all the young people who go out into the world 
from the colonies, their careers will be carefully 
watched, and by an act of grace they may receive 
assistance should ill-fortune overtake them. 

While walking in this beautiful garden, which is 
always changing its appearance, as the lads are taught 



THE CHARITY COLONIES 317 

to plant it and lay it out in fresh designs, Mr. Bleeker 
tells me something of the history of these colonies. 
Briefly, in the evil days following the French occupation 
in the beginning of the century. Count van den Bosch 
founded the Society of Charity, with the purpose of 
giving poor people the means of livelihood in reclaim- 
ing some of the waste lands of the country. A great 
interest was taken in the work by Prince Frederik, the 
son of William I., and the first colony, this one on 
which we are at present, was named Frederiksoord 
after him. Frederiksoord lies in Drente ; to it was 
added Wilhelminasoord, which is partly in Friesland, 
and Willemsoord in the northeast corner of Overysel, 
and, later, Kolonie VIL The four colonies together 
contain over five thousand acres of land, which when 
they came into possession of the society were sombre 
Drente moorland such as I have described earlier. 
The work is supported by private subscription, and at 
the moment of my visit sixteen hundred people had 
their homes on the estate. 

Now we can drive through the colonies with some 
understanding of the conditions in which they have 
come into existence. A road lined with firs leads past 
the Forestry School and one of the five public schools, 
and presently between grass lands with neat little 
cottages at intervals upon them. In these cottages 
live the agricultural labourers, the colonists proper, 
who are paid a weekly wage, from which a small sum 
Is deducted for clothing and the service of the doctor^ 



3i8 



GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 



and are given their house and a patch of garden ground 
at a merely nominal rent. There are ninety-one of 
these colonist families on the estate at the moment. 
Just beyond the grass lands we come upon the first 
of the six large farms on which the labourers for the 




Washing Day. 



most part work. Each farm is from a hundred to a 
hundred and fifty acres in extent, and is managed by a 
skilled farmer, a grieve, who is an official. Continuing 
our drive, we pass a Protestant church, a Roman 
Catholic church, an almshouse, another farm, and so 
on for about four miles, when we reach the boundary 



THE CHARITY COLONIES 319 

of the estate. The ground plan of the colonies is in 
the shape of the letter T. The road by which we have 
come through Frederiksoord and Wilhelminasoord is 
the vertical stem ; while the cross-head is represented 
by Willemsoord and Kolonie VII., which stretch for 
fifteen miles right and left in a long narrow strip. In 
these two, also, there are schools and farms and good 
roads, and in all respects, Mr. Bleeker tells me, they 
resemble the older colonies, except that in Kolonie VII. 
there is still a considerable extent of waste ground. 
Besides the labourers there are on the estate a hundred 
and seventy free farmers, colonists who after showing 
skill and industry in agricultural work are made inde- 
pendent by being put into a small farm of five or six 
acres, for which they pay a rent of from nine to six- 
teen shillings an acre, according to the quality of the 
land. I visited one of these free farms, on which lived 
a man and his wife and three children. With them 
lodged one of the young apprentices in the Horti- 
cultural school, who are admitted from the outside. 
The farmer took me over his croft, which he worked 
himself. Part of it was under grass, and he kept a 
cow, and several pigs. By hard work, he was self- 
supporting. 

On our return drive we alighted to inspect several 
of the workshops and institutions of the colonies. At 
the farm Prinses Marianne a new dairy is being built 
on the most modern lines, to which all the milk on 
the estate will be brought. On this farm there are 
twenty-four cows, and two pairs of horses, and while 



320 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

standing in the farmyard I saw two oxen yoked in 
a wagon which they were pulling in an erratic manner 
across the narrow bridge over the canal that ran by 
the side of the road. I was told that there were some 
twenty-five draught oxen on the estate. In different 
workshops in the colonies I saw basket-making, shoe- 
making, tailoring, chair-making, being carried on, and 
several handlooms on which jute, cotton, and coco- 
matting were woven. Six old couples were living in 
the almshouse; most of them were sunning them- 
selves in their gardens. One man and his wife had 
just been moved in from a cottage which they had 
occupied for over fifty years. They admitted that 
they had been kindly dealt with, and were much 
better resting here, but the tears ran down their 
cheeks when they talked of the *' old home " they 
had quitted. The last place I visited was the Protes- 
tant cemetery, a quiet spot among trees, decently 
kept. Two men v/ere working on the shrubs and 
paths in it when I was there. Mr. Bleeker pointed 
out to me stones above the graves, which have been 
erected to the memory of the men and women lying 
there by sons and daughters born in the colony, who 
have gone out into the world, and have done well. 

I bade good-bye to my agreeable guide, and drove 
away from Frederiksoord with the conviction, which 
nothing I saw or heard later changed, that I had been 
visiting one of the best and the very happiest of the 
institutions of Holland. It is easy to see defects in 
it, especially econgmic defects in the method in which 



THE KERMIS 321 

some of the industries are conducted. I hear of a 
private, independent, agricultural and industrial colony 
started in the Veluwe, and it will be interesting to see 
if it will point out to the charity colonies farther 
north the way by which such co-operative communi- 
ties can be made self-supporting. But that the So- 
ciety of Charity has done a great work no one can 
doubt who visits Frederiksoord, and reflects that the 
beautiful estate there, well-farmed, well-ordered, a 
garden, has been reclaimed from waste by the labour 
of the wastB human products of the country, and that 
but for it, the sixteen hundred colonists, all of them 
free, many of them independent and self-supporting, 
who live busy, contented, and peaceful lives there, 
might have lapsed into the condition of destitute and 
vagabond poor. 

As to-morrow we are going to visit the Veenhuizen 
colonies, which lie several miles east of Assen, we 
continue our journey to that town, after dining in 
busy, shop-keeping Meppel. Assen, peat-smelling 
Assen, at ordinary seasons resounds with the screams 
of stuck pigs, but to-night it is filled with a din, com- 
pound of the blare of trumpets, the shrieks of steam- 
whistles, and the raucous voice of the persuasive 
showman, that would drown the dying squeals of all 
the pigs in Drente. We have happened upon the 
kermis week. So long as it retained its character of 
a fair, the Dutch kermis flourished. There were 
well-known merchants from all countries who at- 
tended year after year with special goods, the like of 

21 



322 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

which for high quality were not to be bought any- 
where else. So, at any rate, folks persuaded them- 
selves, and people of all classes made the keinnis a 
great shopping time. I know some families who, up 
to within a year or two ago, bought all their gloves of 
a certain merchant from the Tyrol, — at least, he wore 
a Tyrolese hat. These were the days when Basch 
pitched his magic tent in the centre of the fair, and 
Carre never failed with his circus; and, after visiting 
it, the "quality" went on to the h eigne t-^-dXoow and 
kept the French cooks busy until midnight. Times 
have changed. Carre and Basch have gone the way 
that even in Holland the old order must go. The 
Tyrolese hat has disappeared from behind the canvas 
stall, and the French cooks fritter their apples on 
other fires. 

So long, however, as there is a kermis, there, must 
be wafels and pojfertjes ; so often, therefore, as a 
kermis is described, these mysteries must be discov- 
ered. Know, then, that wafels are thin, square, crisp 
cakes, with soft fringes, sprinkled with sugar, and 
seasoned with cinnamon, and baked in a flat folding- 
iron while you wait. Greatly more imposing is the 
manufacture of the pojfertje. High aloft, beside two 
tubs of burnished brass, one containing batter, the 
other sugar, a woman sits facing a fierce fire of wood. 
On the fire is a huge iron girdle, with little hollows 
in it, and beside it a man-cook, with a tossing-fork 
in his hand. You have ordered your pojfertjes, and 
retired within one of the little compartments into 



WAFELS AND POFFERTJES 323 

which the tent is curtained off. The cook deftly 
brushes the girdle with butter^ the woman as deftly 
ladles the batter into the hollows, the cook turns it 
over with his fork, in a second or two twenty-four 
cakes are whipped upon a plate, a pat of butter in 
the centre of them, and sugar all over, and they are 
handed in to you, — twenty-four poffertjes, according 
to special kermis recipe. 

In Assen, to-night, there is abundance of these 
more or less succulent wonders, but nothing else to 
suggest an institution peculiarly Dutch. One pret- 
tily shaded alley is lined with stalls of merchandise, 
but the business done at them is mostly in fairings. 
Even in desolate Drente the market has fallen into 
decay. At the farther end of the alley, the centre of 
all the noise and glare, are shows and steam merry- 
go-rounds at which a crowd of townspeople gape sol- 
emnly. A few girls, sillier than their neighbours, 
persist in getting giddy on the necks of the nodding 
horses. Now and then the silver helmet of a peasant 
woman sparkles up through the interstices of her lace 
cap, to remind us that we are not at a degenerate 
market at home. But there are few peasants here, 
though Assen is full of them to-night. So I have 
noticed, that at a Scots feeing-market the ploughmen 
and their sweethearts dance on the green, and leave 
the merry-go-rounds to the burgher lads and lasses. 
The peasants in Assen are not dancing, but on the 
other side of the town, on our way hither, we saw 
them buzzing about a public-house door, — squat and 



324 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

brisk little figures, the women seemed, under their 
bullet-shaped headgear, — like bees about a hive. I 
cannot say that there are any indications of the orgies 
with which the Dutch kermis has come to be asso- 
ciated. It is a silly, noisy festival, — not vicious, 
apparently. But I only repeat what you will be told 




A Kermis Fantasy. 
From a drawing by Henricus. 

a hundred times in Holland itself, when I say that 
there is in the Dutch peasant a strain of brutishness, 
— the old Dutch pictures prepare us for that, — and 
that the kermis is a season of deplorable license still. 
Several years ago, the magistracy of Amsterdam 
braved a riot and abolished the festival, substituting 
tamer frolics for it, and in many other places their 



THE VEENHUIZEN COLONIES 325 

example has been followed. The kermis is dying hard, 
but it is dying, and nobody in Holland will lament it. 

The road from Assen to Veenhuizen lies along 
canals, at first pleasantly through hamlets and green 
fields, but afterwards over a dreary Drente moor, 
across which the northwest wind blows viciously, 
nipping us to the bone even in the sunniest corner 
of the Napoleon. There is a compensation in the 
discomfort of the journey; for when we do reach 
Veenhuizen we better appreciate the reclamation that 
has been carried out there. We have found another 
Frederiksoord, so it appears, a green spot planted in 
this desert of heath. As a matter of fact, the Veen- 
huizen colonies at one time were part of the esta.tes 
of the Society of Charity, which afterwards sold the 
land — it was the poorest land on the property — ^to 
Government ; and to describe them would be to paint 
in slightly less glowing colours the charity colonies 
out from Steenwijk, which we have visited already. 
When we enter the colony, however, there are many 
indications that this is not an institution like that 
which delighted us yesterday. A sentry-box here and 
there, the barracks built round the square, the official 
in uniform at the entrance, and especially the distinc- 
tive green-brown dress of the colonists unloading the 
boat on the canal, remind us that this is not free 
Frederiksoord but penal Veenhuizen. 

In Holland, besides the prisons proper, there are 
penal educational and working institutions under 
State control. A child who is not yet ten years old 



326 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

is never brought before a criminal judge, but the civil 
chamber of the tribunal can commit him for a period, 
at farthest until he is eighteen, to one of these edu- 
cational establishments. A judge has it in his power 
to deal in the same way with children between the 
years of ten and sixteen who are charged before him. 
Of the penal working institutions, again, the chief is 
this colony at Veenhuizen. Here are sent, for peri- 
ods varying from three months to three years, con- 
victed beggars and tramps who are capable of working, 
and also men who have been convicted of drunken- 
ness three times within a year. There used to be a 
similar colony at Ommerschans, in Overysel, but it 
has been done away with. Until recently, the first 
establishment at Veenhuizen — there are three in all 
— was for women, but vagabond women are now sent 
to Rotterdam. 

I have an introduction to the Director of this first 
establishment, but, finding that there is a Govern- 
ment inspection there to-day, we drive on to Number 
Three, over which we are conducted by its Director, 
Count van Limburg-Stirum, who very kindly offers to 
be our guide. Later in the afternoon we return to 
Number Two, and are shown over it also. There is 
no need for the reader to follow us step by step. In 
the three colonies there are over three thousand per- 
sons. The official quarters are separated from the 
convict barracks, where the beggars live, sleeping in 
hammocks, slung from the not too lofty roofs of the 
dormitories, in which also they take their food. This 



THE VEENHUIZEN COLONIES 327 

old and bad arrangement, Count van Limburg-Stirum 
points out, is in course of being abolished; and after- 
wards, in the second colony, we are taken over new 
barracks, nearly ready for occupation, in which the 
beggars will live and eat in common rooms on the 
ground floor, while each will have an isolated night 
cell on the first storey. Black bread is the chief food 
of the colonists. They are given no luxuries. But 
of the wages paid them for their work, which run to 
about tenpence or a shilling per week on the aver- 
age, they are allowed to spend two-thirds in the can- 
teen, on butter, bacon, and tobacco; the remaining 
third is retained in the hands of the direction until 
the day comes when the colonist must go out into 
the world again. The work done at Veenhuizen is 
very varied. Number Three colony reminded us a 
good deal of Frederiksoord. Agriculture was exten- 
sively carried on, with fairly successful results; there 
was a good deal of planting, and we were taken 
through matting, tailoring, shoe-making, and weaving 
shops, as well as over a farm-steading. At Number 
Two, there are more extensive industries than any in 
the charity colonies. We visited workshops in which 
smiths and carpenters were engaged on jobs of con- 
siderable size. The colonists manufacture or rear 
almost all that they require, — their clothes, food, 
and blankets, — that is the sum of their needs ; and 
they provide most things for the officials and for the 
carrying on of colony work. I saw one man mending 
a keeper's watch, and others forging a spring for the 



328 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

Director's landau. The new barracks are built en- 
tirely by colony hands. 

Are these beggar colonies, then, a successful ex- 
periment .-^ Public opinion in Holland certainly says 
that they are not, and I carried away the impression 
that the enlightened opinion in the colonies them- 
selves was much of the same way of thinking. There 
are flaws in the institution which no attempt is made 
to hide. With perfect frankness, weak points as well 
as strong were pointed out to us. Veenhuizen is not 
self-supporting. It is conducted, deliberately, upon 
a system that makes it impossible for it ever to be 
self-supporting. Work must be found for the in- 
mates, yet through their work the State must not 
come into active competition with private enterprise. 
Such is the policy adopted ; consequently, on prin- 
ciple, improved machinery is not introduced into the 
workshops. Slow and cumbrous methods are pre- 
ferred because, by means of them, these idle hands 
can be kept longer employed. Save in one of the 
shops, where newer machinery has to be used if the 
colony is to retain certain Government contracts in 
cloths, all the weaving is done on hand-looms. It 
costs the country thirty thousand pounds a year to 
keep up Veenhuizen, and, let it be said at once, that 
is not an excessive sum for the work done, consider- 
ing the manner of the doing of it. If any consider- 
able proportion of the colonists who pass through 
Veenhuizen leave vagabond habits behind them, and 
enter upon a steady and regular life of work, Holland 



THE VEENHUIZEN COLONIES 329 

purchases the reformation of her beggars cheaply. 
Only, the pertinent question may be asked, " If such 
is the result, why is not the system extended ? " 
Though Holland is not a beggarly country, — far from 
it, — she has more tramps out of Veenhuizen still than 
ever have been in it. The State, it is very certain, 
does not contemplate the establishment of other Veen- 
huizens. Rather, I have the conviction, it looks upon 
the one it has got already as a white elephant which 
it must maintain with as little of a wry face as pos- 
sible. And the reason is that Veenhuizen does not 
exercise an educative influence, and that it is doubt- 
ful if to any great extent the inmates of it represent 
the real vagabondage of the country. It is openly 
acknowledged that the same people, as a rule, are to 
be found in Veenhuizen year after year. There are 
desertions from it; but rarely only. Count Van 
Limburg-Stirum told me that it was only first-term 
colonists, as a rule, who gave trouble. There is tes- 
timony in that fact, no doubt, to the consideration 
with which the inmates, who in reality are prisoners, 
are treated; but the true explanation is that it is as 
easy for tramps and beggars, who have no fancy for 
the life at Veenhuizen, to keep out of it, as it is for 
the colonists who desire it to get sent back when 
their term there has expired. One man with whom 
I spoke had worked for fifteen years in London. " I 
had a nice house out Kilburn way," he told me, "and 
made big wages. It's a fine place to live in," he 
added with a sigh ; he meant London, let me say, lest 



330 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

any Kilburn person should be unnecessarily exalted. 
" Why did he leave it ? A feeling for the old coun- 
try, I suppose." Now he was in Veenhuizen, be- 
cause of drink, of course; a man well up in years, too 
old to return to his old job in London, much as he 
would like it. I am certain he did not contemplate 
being out of Veenhuizen for any length of time dur- 
ing the rest of his days. Another colonist with 
whom I spoke was more explicit. He was a clever 
mechanic, I was given to understand ; he had the face 
of a very clever man ; and he spoke several languages. 
When he was freed from the restraints of Veenhuizen, 
he went wrong with drink; so he told me, and also, 
that as soon as possible after he left the colony he 
was back again. That was easy, by tacit understand- 
ing with the police. Evidently he looked upon Veen- 
huizen as a free asylum in which he voluntarily placed 
himself. I do not wish to press the point unduly, 
but I believe it is not denied that very many of the 
colonists are voluntary inmates of this penal estab- 
lishment, and are sent to it with the connivance of 
the authorities in the towns. The police must 
know very well when a man begs flagrantly under 
their noses in order to be arrested. And when it is 
not a haven for numbed ambitions and conscious 
weakness of will, Veenhuizen is a shelter in winter 
for the vagabond who likes to tramp in the summer 
sunny weather only. The soundest justification for 
its existence is that by means of it three thousand 
idle men are kept off the streets (which is much), 




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332 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

— and that (which is more), the vagabond population 
is not added to so quickly as otherwise it would be. 
But the charity colonies, defective as their principle 
is in many ways, suggest a system whereby these ends 
might be reached without the attendant evils of Veen- 
huizen, and I do not think that it will be long before 
Holland, which has always been an open-minded 
pioneer in her treatment of the indigent and vaga- 
bond poor, and is in many ways favourably situated to 
be so, — in Veenhuizen itself, let it be remembered, 
she was far in advance of other countries, — remodels 
her beggar colonies, and works them upon a more 
enlightened method. 

These charity and penal colonies have kept us too 
long out of Groningen, busiest and most flourishing 
of Dutch provinces, whose inhabitants have a repu- 
tation for clever heads, and but little of the artistic 
instinct. The city of Groningen especially compels 
the homage of the visitor to Holland. She wears a 
royal air. Unfortunately, we cannot linger in the 
great market place or in the handsome boulevards, for 
we are in search of the peat which is the object of our 
journey northwards, and the famous peat-colonies lie 
far to the eastward. 

Peat, butter, and the herring, — these are the three 
great products of Holland. The herring industry is 
one of her departed glories, and we shall learn some- 
thing of its history when we visit the fishing-towns 
on the Maas. In Friesland, the land of butter, as the 
old gentleman at Meppel taught us, we shall see how 



DUTCH PEAT 333 

she is struggling to keep a market for her dairy- 
produce. In both, her competitors have outstripped 
her; but in the preparation of peat, she is without a 
rival. The peat-boats on her canals are even more 
characteristic than the black-and-white cattle of her 
meadows, or the full-bellied boms of Scheveningen 
and Katwijk. 

The reader must understand, however, that the peat 
beds of Holland are of two kinds. Hard peat, or hard 
titrf, as the Dutch call it, is found in the low beds, 
under a layer of clay of varying thickness. When the 
bed is opened, this layer is carefully put aside. The 
peat is removed, the water drained off; and the clay 
is replaced, mixed with sand, and excellent crops are 
grown upon it. The peat itself, having been removed 
by dredging from the water in which it lies in sat- 
uration, is spread upon the neighbouring ground, 
kneaded and treaded, and so brought by the sun and 
the pressure of human foot to a consistency at which 
manipulation of it is possible; then it is cut, stacked, 
dried, and ultimately sent to market. That is the 
history of the fine, hard peat that is used in the stoves 
of houses, and in the footstools with which my lady 
keeps herself comfortable in church ; and it has been 
explained earlier in this book how the exhaustion and 
non-draining of low peat-beds — often at the expense 
of fine agricultural land — ^was the origin of many of 
the stretches of water which covered the face of the 
Dutch lowlands in earlier days. The high-fens, again, 
are beds, several feet in thickness, of peat of a lighter. 



334 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

softer, more fibrous nature ; they stretch, as has been 
shown already, right down the east of Groningen and 
Drente, and across the German borders, and one such 
bed is the notorious Peel, in Brabant and in Limburg, 
which the reader has visited earlier in his journey. 
On the northern beds, for two hundred years and 
more, the famous Groningen fen-colonies have been 
established, removing the peat, making a new soil, 
and transforming the dreariest into the greenest land- 
scape. To-day, the great reclaiming energy has been 
transferred from them to the new colonies of New 
Amsterdam and New Dordrecht, in the extreme south- 
east of Drente. Still, near Buinen, we have heard, 
where the older Groningen colonies have reached into 
the province of Drente, a high peat-bed is being dug, 
and we are going there in the hope of receiving from 
the cultivated fields side by side with the opened 
high-fen an object lesson in this work of reclamation. 

The railway journey, at first through beautiful 
meadow-land, but afterwards among fields submerged 
and looking like a green sea, and past the Kropswolde 
Meer, which is ridden by little snarling waves, ends 
at Zuidbroek ; there, a horse-car stands ready to take 
us to Veendam, and so on through the fen-colonies. 
A few minutes in the car brings us to the beginning 
of Veendam ; half an hour has gone before we reach 
the end of it. It is one long, never-ending street ; or, 
rather, it is an interminable canal lined on each side 
by an interminable row of houses. Immediately be- 



THE FEN COLONIES ^ 335 

hind the houses the fields begin. By-and-bye, we 
reach a junction from which a road leads to Pekela, 
the oldest of the colonies, but we keep on to Wilder- 
vank, unconscious where it begins and Veendam ends ; 
and when, as the conductor announces, we pass beyond 
Wildervank, still the road runs on between the two 
lines of houses. The explanation is found in the 
development of a fen-colony. As a first step, canals 
are constructed, into which the fen is to be drained. 
That done, the peat-diggers arrive, and of course they 
settle upon the canal banks. By-and-bye shops spring 
up; a church and a school follow. The peat is car- 
ried to the towns in boats, which return laden with 
the town's refuse- out of which the new soil is to be 
formed ; the rich crops of the colonies here are the 
products of the refuse of Groningen ; and in time 
boat-building yards dot the canals. In earlier days 
the peat-boats were all of wood, but now iron-boats 
can be seen on the stocks, and the clang of the ham- 
mers on them is carried far down the canals. Larger 
houses took the place of the diggers' huts, but always, 
howsoever the colony increased, it stretched along 
the canal, never back from it. Thus Veendam and 
Wildervank are explained. 

Somewhere beyond Wildervank, but where exactly 
I am not certain, there lives a farmer, — one of the 
clever Drente farmers, says my informant, among 
whom are to be found the highest agricultural skill 
and enterprise in the country, — and to him I am to 
present myself with an informal introduction. I am 



336 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

to mention to him' a name that (so I am assured) will 
be " open sesame " to his good graces, and am then to 
say, " Sir, we have come through divers perils by 
land and water to the end of the world here, to see a 
high-peat bed; and if you do not assist us, then shall 
all our travail have been in vain." With this upon 
our minds, we go as far as the tramway will take us; 
not without adventures that seem to justify our de- 
scent upon the unhappy man, or such is the feeling we 
encourage. When we have alighted, we are directed 
to a destination, estimated by the Dutch methods of 
calculation as being distant "one hour walking." 
The way is not uninvrting. The hot, bright monot- 
ony of the landscape is varied by vicious rain-clouds 
that gather and break in a flood of shadow. In the 
fields around us is proof of the clever Drente farm- 
ing, and its success is indicated by the handsome 
farm-houses, which within their little clusters of 
sheltering wood have the air of mansions. At 
length, the farm where the Unknown lives is pointed 
out to us, and almost before we have realised our 
rashness, we are reciting to him our extraordinary 
tale. 

The pass-word name does not appear to be " open 
sesame." As we approached his door, we had seen 
the farmer seated at a little window-nook that com- 
mands the bridge spanning the canal from the road to 
the gateway, his unwavering eye upon it, the rumi- 
nant pipe between his lips. Now, as we stand before 
him, that eye is upon us as unwaveringly, while he 



THE FEN COLONIES 337 

bids us repeat the talismanic name, and asks us, with 
long, pondering puffs between, the manner and the 
purport of our journey. In these moments of sus- 
pense, there rises before my mind a vision, and I 
murmur to myself, President Paul Kruger. Then, 
suddenly, he throws wide hospitable portals, and 
passes round the cigar box, and by-and-bye, while the 
horse is being yoked in the gig, carries us over his 
farm, — cow-house, stable, pig-shed, — into the very 
fields, where he scrapes away a few inches of surface 
soil with his fingers to discover for us the peat in 
which his fine barley is rooted. It turned out a red- 
letter expedition ; but the reader may only hear of the 
high-peat bed. 

It lay at the end of a two-hours' drive, and the ulti- 
mate, black, terrifying steppe in the world it seemed. 
Entering upon it, drained though it was, the foot sank 
deeper at every stride, and the imagination pictured 
the horror and despair of the forwandered waggoner 
of earlier times when he found himself and his horses 
and cart sinking slowly into that infernal moss, where 
the antiseptic peat would preserve his bones till the 
digger of later days should rake them out. A hun- 
dred yards in front of us, where the horrid black 
tumuli of peat are thickest-set, there is a digger at 
work. He is a swank man, middle-aged, clean-shaven. 
His coat is off; besides his shirt, he wears tight knee- 
breeches, and green stockings, — blue stockings, 
weather-stained to green. His shoes have flat, ex- 
tended soles, to prevent his sinking in the sloppy 

22 



338 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

hole in which he works. His curiously-shaped spade 
has a blade the breadth of a peat, and as sharp as the 
north wind that whistles across the moor in spring. 
With it, with practised skill, he slices through the 
pulpy bed; first vertically, standing upon the level of 
the moor, then, down in the pit, horizontally; next, 
with the same spade, he lifts the peats, one by one, 
and flings them, in perfect order, upon the open bar- 
row beside him. When it is filled the barrow is 
wheeled up to the stack, and by a deft movement cap- 
sised so that the cubes fall in an orderly heap. So 
the peat is dug from the bed to a depth of several 
feet. 

A rain-squall scurries across the moor, and we take 
shelter in lee of one of the stacks of drying peat. 
The cubes have shrunk to a third of their original 
size, as the moisture evaporated. The peats are esti- 
mated at ten thousand to the stack, which, of the 
quality in this moor here, will fetch in the market 
about forty shillings. Such a stack is, roughly 
speaking, one day's work for six men, who are paid 
nine guilders for it. Reckoning thus, we fix the 
digger's weekly wage at nine guilders, or fifteen shil- 
lings. Most men, however, make more, — from 
twelve to fifteen guilders; and they work hard for 
it, and from the middle of March to the end of 
June only. This man has been out on the moor 
since four o'clock in the morning, and he will not 
leave it until six to-night. He brings his coffee 
with him ; his coffee-pot is kept warm on the little 



THE FEN COLONIES ^ 339 

tuft of burning peat, yonder, from which a wisp of 
smoke battles with the rain. Lying near him is 
his little tin of oil, with which he rubs his hands to 
keep them from cracking. '' How many diggers are 
there in the peat-colonies.^" I ask him, when the 
storm has passed, and we cross to him again. " Seven 
hundred men in Drente alone, not counting the women 
and children," he replies, and I almost believe I hear 
the brogue. " The women and children do the stack- 
ing and drying," he goes on, "three guilders a week; 
but it's not woman's work." "What! Are you a 
Socialist.?" says the Drente farmer. "No, not a 
Socialist. But it's not woman's work," replies 
the digger stoutly, and scans the moor as if he 
might expect the markhattssees to be down upon 
him. 

It is a far cry from Buinen to The Peel, but we 
must make the journey in order to see a new indus- 
try that has sprung up on the peat-beds. The peat 
on The Peel is very similar to that in Drente, and it, 
also, is being dug for fuel. But from the upper mossy 
layers there is made a litter for cattle and horses, 
known as moss-litter, large quantities of which are ex- 
ported to Germany, France, England, and Belgium. 
There is a considerable industry in this on English 
peat-moors, and English capital is invested in a moss- 
litter company on The Peel itself, close by the 
station Helenaveen on the railway route from Flush- 
ing to Cologne. It is, however, a Dutch Company's 
property, Helenaveen, some miles to the south of the 



340 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

other, that we are going to visit. The manager of 
the company, Mr. van Blocquerij, has very kindly 
sent his carriage to meet us; and we repeat an old 
experience when we drive along the canals, down 
which the laden peat-boats crawl, and by-and-bye 
leave the bare black moorland for the green fields of 
the settlement. The making of moss-litter is neither 
an elaborate nor a particularly interesting process. 
As our visit is paid in spring, we find the floating 
mill moored near the peat-bed that is being worked 
at the moment; the peat is manipulated in it, and 
the litter is shipped in compressed bales. Before the 
canals become ice-bound, the mill is anchored near 
the station, and is supplied with peat from a store 
that has been brought there against the winter. At 
Helenaveen, too, the fibrous moss from which the 
litter is separated is treated by simple and ingenious 
machinery, and converted into various products that 
are valuable on account of their antiseptic qualities. 
A fine fibre is produced, for example, that can be used 
medicinally like cotton -wool. 

It is considered as a settlement, however, that this 
property of the Helenaveen company is most interest- 
ing. In many ways it is a model colony. How ad- 
mirably it is conducted is shown by the fact that 
when, shortly before his death, King William III. 
offered a premium for the encouragement of the cul- 
tivation of waste lands in Holland, it was to the 
Helenaveen settlement that it was awarded. The 
boundaries of the estate would be extended farther in 




Rye-bread, 



342 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

certain directions, were it not for the disinclination 
of the neighbouring commune to sell the peat on its 
common moor. In a characteristic Dutch manner, 
the commune is looking far forward. When the peat 
is cleared, it argues, the colonists may not continue 
to thrive on its agriculture, and the burden of their 
poverty will fall upon the commune. There may 
be some foundation for that fear, of course; but at 
present, at any rate, Helenaveen is prosperous. The 
fields are fertile. Possibly in time the company may 
see its way to launch out into new industries. There 
appears to be no reason why here, as in the fen-col- 
onies in the north, there should not be a factory for 
making meal from the potato, which grows so well on 
this soil. The planting done on the estate has had 
successful results which ought to encourage the Dutch 
Forestry Society in its endeavours to extend the im- 
provement of heaths and moors. From his house- 
windows Mr. van Blocquerij pointed out to us peeps 
of wood and garden of which he was justly proud. 
Helenaveen is a commercial undertaking, but it was 
evident that the management have closely at heart the 
well-being of all who live on the property; and as 
we drove through it, the model cottages, the gardens, 
the well-favoured people on the roads, women and 
children returning from the bakery with the rye-bread 
under their arms, the workers coming off the moor 
with a ready salute for us as we passed, — all gave 
us the pleasantest impression of. this desert place 
made green. 



DUTCH DAIRY PRODUCE 



343 



Back to Groningen, and thence through the mead- 
owlands of Friesland by interesting stages : long, 
straggling, wooded Dragten, where the inevitable in- 
quiry, "Have you come from Holland?" begins; 
Leeuwarden, picturesque capital of the province, on 
holiday, when we arrive in it, because of the horse- 
races; Franeker, the seat of one of the universities 




Skating. 
From a drawing by Henricus. 



m ^j 



suppressed by Napoleon ; Harlingen, Bolsward, Sneek, 
that skim the cream from these meadows; Hindelo- 
pen, the museum of old Friesland ; Stavoren, decayed 
•Hanse town, where the boat waits that will carry us 
across the Zuider Zee to Enkhuizen. We have been 
passing through the great butter country. 

Dutch dairy produce has lost the hold of the world's 
market which it had for several centuries, but for that 



344 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

the Dutch farmer is not wholly to blame. Antiquated 
methods are only one cause of the decline, and it was 
not the boers alone who practised them. An exten- 
sive industry in margarine sprang up some years ago 
and choked the butter trade. I find that down to 
1885, pure butter and this butterine were exported 
without proper differentiation. In that year, the im- 
port into England from Holland of butter and but- 
terine was returned at a gross figure of a little over 
a million pounds. For 1886, when the imports were 
returned separately, the figures were 835,328 lbs. of 
butterine to 359,000 lbs. of butter. By 1894 the 
butter had dropped to 165,000 lbs., and the butterine 
had risen to 1,045,330 lbs. That gives some idea of 
the condition into which the trade had fallen. Mean- 
while the pure butter was not of a quality to compete 
with the produce of America and Denmark with their 
improved systems of manufacture. It could not be. 
Then, as now, the Dutch boers housed their cattle 
well, generally under the same roof as themselves, 
and generally yielding up to them the southern and 
western exposures. The cleanliness of the Dutch 
cow-houses, of course, has always been notorious. 
But then, as now, the farms were small. They do not, 
and did not, as a rule, exceed a hundred acres ; the 
average possibly is not above thirty acres. On most 
of them, it is true, as many cows are kept as there 
are hectares, but even so the milk produce of each 
must be insignificant. The middleman's cart was 
sent round these small farms to collect their produce, 



DUTCH CATTLE 345 

and all the contributions were mixed together and the 
mass exported under one brand. That was the prac- 
tice frequently, at any rate, in Friesland and the other 
butter-producing provinces, and it is no wonder, there 
fore, that Dutch butter ceased to command the 
market. 

Happily, there has been a change in all this in the 
last few years. The black and white kine of the 
meadowlands are mostly of a breed closely related to 
the Holsteins. ' They are large and massive animals. 
" The beeves of Holland and Friesland are very great, " 
wrote Guicchardini at the end of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. Guicchardini visited the country some thirty 
years after Paul Potter painted his famous "Bull," of 
which an English agriculturist, Mr. J. K. Fowler, 
says that it is such a wretch that " I would not have 
allowed him to look over a hedge into the field where 
my shorthorns were grazing." But English breeders 
have made great advances in shape and colour and 
quality since Paul Potter's day, and so have the 
Dutch. Many of the boers, though by no means the 
majority, enter their animals in the provincial herd- 
books. More care, too, is being taken to breed from 
milkers, with the result that the cows, while poor in 
the production of meat, are deep milkers. For quan- 
tity of milk, the Dutch cows have always been noted. 
On the other hand the milk is not of the highest 
quality. Mr. Fowler believes, and Dutch farmers 
have told me something of the same kind, that a 
well-bred Guernsey and Jersey will often produce as 



346 GRONINGEN AND THE NORTH 

much butter as two Dutch cows, even if she is only 
half their size. 

But the thing most necessary in order to restore the 
position and good name of Dutch dairy produce was a 
system of combination in improved manufacture such 
as exists in the countries competing with it. That is 
now to be found increasingly throughout all Holland. 
Everywhere, zuivel-fabriekcji (as butter-and-cheese 
factories are called), are as common as sigaren-fab- 
rieken. They are of all sizes, and are worked accord- 
ing to a great variety of conditions. In a very large 
factory that I visited, one of three in the country be- 
longing to the same company, the manufacture of 
condensed milk, begun on a small scale, has increased 
to such proportions that a building is being erected 
for refining the sugar required in the process. A 
cheap condensed milk is made from milk from which 
the butter-fat has been extracted, and so there is a 
considerable production of butter as well. Over the 
three factories, fully one hundred thousand litres of 
milk daily, the produce of many thousands of cows, 
are contracted for. Employment is given to six hun- 
dred hands, and from the carriage entailed a benefit 
accrues to the country. On the other hand, the pic- 
turesque butter market is disappearing in those places 
where such large concerns are established. Even 
more interesting and advantageous are the small fac- 
tories that one meets with, often conducted on a co- 
operative system with a division of profits. In one 
of these which I saw in Drente, as many as one hun- 




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34^ GRONINGEN and the NORTH 

dred and eighty farmers were co-operating. The 
farms were small, mere crofts, and the output was a 
very trifling contribution to the Harlingen export, 
but the results quite satisfied the farmers. Another, 
in North Brabant, was still more modest. The milk 
of a hundred or a hundred and fifty cows only was 
treated, and the machinery was worked by hand; yet 
the experiment was considered successful. In still 
another factory, in South Holland, to which some 
forty fair-sized farms sent their milk, the more exact- 
ing demands of a private company were met by a very 
fair dividend. In all these factories there is emula- 
tion after the most improved methods. Competition 
secures that. Moreover, there is a healthy competi- 
tion among the farmers themselves. Twice or thrice 
a week their milk is tested, and they profit according 
to its quality. A farmer who finds himself beaten in 
quality by a neighbour will experiment in feeding his 
cows, and if his milk still fails in butter-fats, he will 
probably conclude that his animals are not so good as 
they ought to be, and will replace them when he can 
buy better. And this admirable rivalry flourishes 
especially in the smaller combinations. In Overysel 
the factories are united in a bond, with a trademark, 
and the members bind themselves by heavy penalties 
to sustain a certain quality. In Drente at the moment 
of writing a similar union is in contemplation. It 
may be the same in other provinces. At any rate, as 
the result of all these endeavours, Dutch butter is 
taking a better place in the market. It is acquiring 



BUTTER AND CHEESE FACTORIES 349 

a better name, — the first step. The import into 
England is rising, slowly, it is true, but, in propor- 
tion, more quickly than that from other countries 
which do an enormously larger business. The vol- 
ume of Dutch dairy produce indeed is ridiculously 
small beside the world's production, but to Holland 
with her tiny farms sustaining a frugal and hard-liv- 
ing population a slight increase in it means much. 



AMSTERDAM AND THE HOLLAND 
PROVINCES. 

LANDED at Enkhuizen, we know ourselves once 
more in the real Holland. A hundred subtle 
indications proclaim it. The provinces we have been 
visiting have their special interests. Each of them 
possesses one thing or another peculiarly its own, 
as we have seen. But besides characteristics par-^ 
ticular or shared with other countries, there is in 
them all a something properly Dutch, and the true 
sources of it are the Holland provinces. In them are 
rooted the distinctive qualities of the Dutch and of 
their country. To them lead all the clues we. have 
been following, bringing us to the illustration and the 
proof at once of all we are in search of. In those 
low-lying provinces, pre-eminently, are found the con- 
stituents of the fight with the waters: the sea, the 
rivers, the canals, the dikes and dunes, the mills 
and polders. In them also are the meadowlands, the 
kine, dairying and haymaking; the low-peat beds; 
the North Sea fishing fleets : in fullest measure and 
activity the ancient industries. Into their ports are 
entered the wealth of the Indies, the fruits and spices 
of the lands which their mariners discovered and their 
adventurers settled ; and through their ports passes 
the commerce of middle-Europe. The municipal 



GYSBRECHT VAN AMSTEL 351 

greatness of Holland, the civic foundation on which 
she has been built, lies in their close-set towns, that 
in their history discover the history of the nation, 
every one of them a landmark in that history; in 
their innumerable villages hum the looms of human 
industry on which she weaves her prosperity. And, 
again, it is in them, in the Rijks Museum, in the 
Maurits Huis, in Haarlem and Rotterdam, in private 
collections in Amsterdam and The Hague and Dor- 
drecht, that are treasured the great pictures; and 
when we travel through them, more vividly than any- 
where else in the country do we find repeated for us 
the condition of life and quality of landscape to which 
that art was devoted, and see displayed the same pas- 
sion for colour, perhaps, as inspired it. Or if we 
come to the more personal characteristics of the 
Dutch people, — ■ simplicity in private life, the in- 
stinct for security, the love of order, — it is in these 
provinces that they are chiefly exhibited. It was not 
without reason that in other parts of the country we 
were greeted with a " Have you come from Holland .? " 
The true Dutch sources are there. 

Every New Year's day, and for several days after- 
wards, there is played in the theatres of Amsterdam 
Vondel's tragedy ''Gysbrecht van Amstel," which 
for some reason or other always is followed by ''De 
Bruiloft van Kloris en Roosje." The only thing I re- 
member about "The Wedding of Kloris and Roosje," 
is that in one scene the characters sit down together to 
a dinner which is not the usual stage sham, but a real 



352 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

feast, to the representation of which the actors bring 
an excess of realism. Vondel's play has a more ad- 
mirable interest. It was written for the opening of 
the first theatre in Amsterdam in 1638, and commem- 
orates the tragedy of Gysbrecht, the fourth Lord of 




Street Vendor. 



Amstel, who lost his independence to Floris V., one 
of the great Counts of Holland. The story of Gys- 
brecht is the earliest history of Amsterdam. His 
castle stood on the Amstel, near the centre of the 
present busy Nieuwendijk, and was destroyed in 
1304. Here we have a guide to the oldest part of 



THE VILLAGE ON THE AMSTEL 353 

the city. It is the well-known Warmoesstraat, the 
place, as the name indicates, where fruit and vege- 
tables were grown. Leading to it was a low place 
with reeds and water plants, the present Niezel, a low 
place still, in another sense. Amsterdam, as every- 
body knows, is built upon a swamp. On the east side 
of the Warmoesstraat, then, there ran, in 1300, from 
the Old Church, the building of which had already 
begun possibly, to near the present Dam Straat, a 
row of houses, — all of Amsterdam that was in exis- 
tence, when the Court of Holland destroyed Gys- 
brecht's castle, according to Vondel's tragedy. It 
was merely a fishing-village on the Amstel, which at 
this point fell into the Zuider Zee, and its harbour 
was at the Damrak, below the Dam, which an earlier 
Gysbrecht had built against the " inroad of the wa- 
ters, " which is the meaning of the name The Rokin. 
To this village. Count Floris gave so many and val- 
uable trading privileges in Holland, Zeeland, and 
Friesland, that in fifty years it had extended to both 
sides of the Damrak, and of The Rokin as well, form- 
ing the close-set and tortuous quarter within the 
limits of the Nieuwe Zijde Voorburgwal and the 
Oude Zijde Voorburgwal which the visitor in Ams- 
terdam does well to explore. By the end of the cen- 
tury, it had spread to the Spui Straat on the one side 
and to the Oude Zijde Achterburgwal on the other, 
and was a Hanse town, with a fleet sailing out of the 
channels of the Vlie and the Texel that carried on 
with the Baltic ports a commerce which competed 
with that of Bruges and of Antwerp. 



354 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

It was during the War of Eighty Years, however, 
that Amsterdam became one of the first cities of 
Europe, even as Holland took a leading place then 
among nations. At the beginning of the struggle, 
the walls ran along the inner side of the inner singel 
on the west and southwest, from the Y to the Ox 
Sluice, in which the Kalver Straat ended, and the 
Sheep Plein, now known as the Sophia Plein; and 
then, east and north by the Kloveniers Burgwal, over 
the Nieuwe Maart, and along the Geldersche Kade, 
at the end of which, upon the Y, again, there had 
been built by this time the famous Schreiers' Toren, 
the "Weepers' Tower," where wives and children 
bade good-bye to husbands and fathers who were sail- 
ing away from the city. Such were the boundaries 
of Amsterdam at the beginning of the life and death 
struggle from which Holland emerged triumphant. 
To note how the city grew between that time and the 
Peace of Westphalia is a lesson in Dutch history, and 
makes it delightful to wander through its old streets. 
Merchants of Brabant and Flanders, driven from the 
south by religious persecutions, crowded into the 
northern capital when she threw off Spanish yoke; 
still more arrived when eight years later Antwerp 
acknowledged Spain again. With them came new 
life and capital, and a spirit of enterprise. By the 
end of the sixteenth century the fortified walls fol- 
lowed more or less the crescent of the present Heeren 
Gracht; that means, as a slight acquaintance with 
Amsterdam tells us, that on the east side there had 




An Amsterdam Type. 
By B. Leas de Leafuna. 



356 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

sprung up a new town as large as the old. On the 
west, meanwhile, the city was extending with the 
extension of the nation's enterprises. The Dutch 
East India Company had been founded. Through 
the spice monopoly, Amsterdam was become one of 
the wealthiest cities of Europe. Sir Thomas Over- 
bury, who visited her in 1609, describes her as sur- 
passing Seville, Lisbon, or any other Mart Town in 
Christendom, with her appropriation of the East In- 
dies trade, for which forty ships were maintained, 
besides a great fleet that sailed twice a year to the 
Baltic. As Bernardin de Saint Pierre wrote later, 
the real pillars of the Republic were those of the 
Bourse of Amsterdam, every one of which was the 
centre of the commerce of some part of the world, and 
bore such names as Bordeaux, London, Archangel, 
and Surinam. It seemed, he said, ''as if the Dutch 
were the proprietors of the whole world, of which the 
other natives were only the fermiers.'' Their rise 
to commercial greatness was extraordinary indeed. 
They built their ships from the wood-yards of Russia 
and Sweden, where also were their warehouses of 
hemp and hides, their mines of copper and iron, the 
arsenals of their army and navy. Their granaries 
were at Dantzig, their wardrobe in Germany; Leip- 
sic and Frankfort supplied them with the linen and 
wools of Saxony and Silesia. Their vineyards were 
in France, their wine-vaults at Bordeaux, their gar- 
dens in Provence and Italy. Asia and its islands 
furnished them with tea and spices, silks and pearls ; 



OLD AMSTERDAM 357 

for them the Chinese baked porcelain, the Indians 
wove muslin ; for them Africa displayed on the banks 
of her rivers pepper and gums, and sent her black 
children to dig gold in Peru and diamonds in Brazil, 
and to plant in America fields of sugar and coffee, 
indigo, cotton, and tobacco. Of all this wonderful 
commerce, which the French traveller described so 
enthusiastically, Amsterdam was the centre. Early in 
the seventeenth century, much of it was in the hands 
of Jews from Portugal, who had been attracted to the 
city by the repute she had for spirit and freedom. 
When Sir William Brereton visited Amsterdam, a 
quarter of a century later than Sir Thomas Overbury, 
there were about three hundred Jewish families there, 
mostly from Portugal, who lived in a street called the 
Jews' Street. It was almost immediately after his 
visit that the German Jews came flocking into the 
city, swelling the Jewish quarter, which lay, as it 
lies still, in the great new extension in the east, 
which we have referred to already. When at length 
the independence of the Republic was acknowledged, 
stately houses and warehouses lined the Heeren 
Gracht, the Keisers Gracht, and the Prinsen Gracht 
as far south as the Leidsche canal. Between them 
and the Lynbaans Gracht, eastward, the crowded re- 
gion of De Jordaan sprang up. It was here that the 
French Protestants settled when Amsterdam gave 
them a home after the revocation of the Edict of 
Nantes. The streets and canals in it bore the names 
of flowers, — Rozenstraat, Egalantinstraat, Linden 



358 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

Gracht, Palmstraat ; hence it was called le jardin^ 
now corrupted into de jordaaii. In the half-century 
that succeeded the war with Spain, the crescent was 
completed on the south and west. In the bight of 
the Heeren Gracht — de bocht, as it is called — arose 
mansions of special magnificence. Three islands were 
constructed on the north, then, — Kattenburg, Wit- 
tenburg, and Oostenburg, where to-day the dock- 
labourers live. Between the islands and the Jewish 
quarter was the Amsterdammers' resort, the Plant- 
age, where now are the Zoological Gardens. At this 
period, too, waters were converted into dry lands ; as, 
for example, the site of the Diaconie Weeshuis, the 
Casino, and other buildings on the Binnin Amstel. 
The reader saw that at the beginning of the War of 
Independence the city walls lined the inner singel. 
Now, at the end of the seventeenth century, they ran 
along the outer singel. Between the two lies the 
history of Holland in the hundred and fifty years of 
her greatness. 

The later history of Amsterdam might be followed 
pleasantly in the history of the Royal Palace on the 
Dam. It was built towards the end of the period of 
which I have been writing, as a Town-Hall, on the 
site of an older Town-Hall. There was a rival 
scheme, — for the city could not afford both: the 
Palace cost ^670,000, ■ — to build a tower upon the 
New Church higher than Utrecht Dom itself; when 
after many bickerings the plan for a Stadhuis was 
adopted, the old Town-Hall was mysteriously burned 




An Amsterdam Type. 
From a drawing by B. Leas de Leguna. 



36o AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

down, which the Amsterdammers thought was a prov- 
idential arrangement. Even after the building had 
been begun, its completion was delayed on account 
of the expenses of the war with England; but in 1655 
it was finished, and, as our experience of various 
Dutch functions would lead us to expect, its opening 
was celebrated, first by services in the Old and the 
New Church, and afterwards by a feast in the Hall 
itself. Fifty years later, Holland entered upon a 
century of humiliation and decline, during which the 
pomp and circumstance of the magisterial rule in 
Amsterdam was in inverse ratio to the country's 
prosperity. In 1768, the young Stadhouder, William 
v., paid a surprise visit to Amsterdam with his 
Queen, Wilhelmina, and that was the first time the 
Town-Hall was used as a palace. Twenty-five years 
later, the Patricians had been dismissed from the 
City Council, and the people were dancing round a 
Tree of Liberty that had been erected on the Dam. 
Louis Napoleon, some years afterwards, was requested 
to accept the building as a palace, which he did, and 
a palace it has remained ever since. But as Wil- 
liam I. gave it back to the city, the royal family, 
when they occupy it for a few days each spring, do so 
really as the guests of Amsterdam. 

At every step in Amsterdam, we are compelled to 
recall the past. Yet the appeal she makes to us is as 
much to the eye as to the imagination. Her charm 
lies in the contrast she presents to both: of old and 
new, light and shadow, the sober gaiety of her silver 



DIAMOND-CUTTING 361 

and russet. Here in the squalid heart of the Jewish 
quarter is a diamond factory. There are visitors to 
it at this moment from half-a-dozen countries, and in 
as many languages in turn a workman explains how 
he must split the imperfect stone precisely at its 
fault, and even the description in many tongues can- 
not make the task anything bat unromantic. The 
cutting and polishing are no less prosaic ; adamant 
worn on adamant is not an inspiring process. There 
is nothing engaging in the conditions of life of the 
workmen. They make big wages, much frequent the 
dancing-saloons at the far end of the Nes, and are 
rather a troublesome class, the police will tell you. 
Diamond-cutting, in fact, is the most prosaic and 
wearisome business possible to contemplate, yet in 
Amsterdam, here in this incongruous quarter, where 
it has been located for three centuries, a glamour is 
cast over it. Or let us make our way from the Jew- 
ish quarter to the Prins Hendrik Kade, and from 
there along the Handels Kade, and see the American 
liner swing from her berth, and the Indiaman lighten 
under the rattling chains, and the constant movement 
on the river, — an inspiriting sight anywhere, but 
here, in the wonderful air of the Y, lifted to the top- 
most note of exhilaration. Even if you have followed 
the tobacco and coffee from the magazins at the 
docks to the auction sales in De Brakke Grond and 
Frascati's, the stir and babel there are forgotten so 
soon as you are out upon The Rokin. 

One of the most interesting institutions in Amster- 



362 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

dam is the fire-brigade. The Hague and Amsterdam 
are the only cities in Holland that maintain brigades, 
though Rotterdam will soon be added to the number. 
In certain places, such as Arnhem, Groningen, and 
Utrecht, the voluntary, "free-will" brigades are 
directed by official commandants. The brigade in 
Amsterdam is a pet hobby of the citizens, who are 
willing to spend as much money upon it as is neces- 
sary to make it a model ; and at a cost of twenty-four 
thousand pounds a year, a model it is, which is vis- 
ited by the representatives from municipalities in all 
countries. By the courtesy of Captain Meiers, the 
commandant, and of Mr. Lodewijks, his adjutant, the 
working of the brigade was explained to me. In 
the centre of the city, near the Kloveniers Burgwal, 
there is an office of administration, which is in tele- 
graphic communication, by call-lines and correspon- 
dence-lines, with four headquarters in different parts 
of the city. In connection with each headquarters, 
and with the central office, are a first-class and a 
second-class station. Besides the commandant, there 
are four head-firemasters, officers, one at each head- 
quarters ; and there are nine fire-masters, one of them 
being the adjutant's assistant. The firemen, of whom 
there are two hundred and seventy-five (to London's 
one thousand. Captain Meiers points out), are of three 
grades, — second-class, first-class, and head-firemen, 
the last being eligible to be raised to the rank of post- 
commandant at second-class stations. At each head- 
quarters there are two manuals, one or two steamers, 



THE FIRE-BRIGADE 



363 



thirty men, and six horses; at first-class stations, one 
manual and one steamer, thirteen men, and four horses, 
and a reserve; and at second-class stations, one man- 
ual, nine men, and two r"""" ~~ ^ 
horses. There are three | I 
hundred and twenty call- 
offices (there are in Lon- 
don six hundred), which are 
in shops and houses 
throughout the city ; there 
are no alarms in the 
streets, and recently the 
system of paying a gratu- 
ity for a first alarm has 







The West Tower. 
From a drawing by J. H. Wijsmuller. 



been abolished. On every street-lamp, the nearest 
call-office is indicated. Within the city proper, every 
possible point of outbreak is within three minutes' 



364 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

distance of a station ; and at each call, automati- 
cally, two stations at least are rung up, one of 
them being a headquarters. By this means, an officer 
is always present at a first-call. The call-lines 
and the correspondence-lines are entirely separate, 
and one notable point in the system is that the ad- 
ministration receives not only notice of an outbreak, 
but a dispatch giving particulars of its situation, ex- 
tent, and of the men and engines that are likely to be 
required to cope with it. 

Accompanied by Mr. Lodewijks, I visited the 
headquarters in the Prinsen Gracht, and also its 
first-class and second-class stations. In all of them, 
everything was in the trimmest order. When we 
were at the Harlemmer Port station a call was re- 
ceived, and far within a minute, the manual was turned 
out and driven off without a hitch. At the Prinsen 
Gracht headquarters, the oldest station in the city, 
are the principal workshops and stores, and also a 
drill-yard and an exercise tower. Captain Meiers 
had told me already that in their spare time the fire- 
men are employed in the saddlery and carpenter 
shops, which supply much of the material required 
by the brigade. The engines, I noticed, were built 
in England ; the hose and couplings came from Ger- 
many. The firemen always remain in their own sec- 
tion, but they go the round of the headquarters and 
the first and second class stations in it. At the 
headquarters there is a canteen, where tea, coffee, 
milk, lemonade, and beer are served; and there is a 



ROTTERDAM 365 

reading and amusement room, with a billiard table. 
The firemen live in the stations for three consecutive 
days of twenty-four hours, which are followed by one 
free day. They are paid a minimum wage of six hun- 
dred guilders a year, and when they are on duty, their 
food is brought to them from their homes. I was told 
that this system works admirably. 

It is the duty of the Commandant of the Fire Brig- 
ade to pass the plans of new buildings erected in the 
city, and also to see provision made in all new and 
existing buildings for escape in case of fire. This 
explained to me an uncanny-looking ladder which I 
had observed the previous night curvetting over the 
leads outside my bedroom window. 

Am.sterdam was built round a castle, Rotterdam 
round a dike. The dike begins near the Ysel and 
runs along the north bank of the Maas to the sea. It 
is the same dike that was cut when the country was 
flooded to relieve Leiden in 1574; and part of it is 
the Hoogstraat of Rotterdam. At this point the 
river Rotte flows into the Maas, and the town got its 
name from the dam on the Rotte, even as Amster- 
dam was called after the dam on the Amstel. It 
also had its fishing village, outside the dike of 
course, and in the names of the streets its place is 
still indicated. So we have the Vischersdijk at the 
back of the Beurs, and the Zeevischmarkt to the west 
of the Blaak. In the middle of the important town 
into which the village had grown by the fifteenth cen- 
tury was the Church of St. Lawrence, still hid away 



366 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

among these old streets behind the dike. It was 
begun to be built about the time that Erasmus was 
born, in a house in the Wijde Kerkstraat that is still 
standing, or was a year or two ago, — a tavern, or a 
greengrocer's shop, or some such, with the inscrip- 
tion Haec est parva domus, magnus qua natus Erasmus. 
The first statue to his memory erected by the Rotter- 
dammers, shortly after his death in 1536, was of wood, 
and was riddled by the bullets of the Spaniards. The 
city, grown rich, took its share in the national strug- 
gle, as, until recently, the " House of a Thousand 
Fears " existed to tell. So we could trace the history 
of Rotterdam in her streets and buildings, right out 
to the Hogendorp's Plein, named after the statesman 
who drew up the Constitution with which William I. 
came to the throne. It is since then, however, espe- 
cially since the separation of Holland and Belgium, 
that Rotterdam, pitting herself against Antwerp, has 
reached one of the foremost places among the com- 
mercial cities of Europe. Between 1830 and 1880 
her population was doubled. As a transit port, her 
situation makes her unrivalled. On the land side 
are the many arms of the Rhine, the chief waterways 
to and from Germany, between which and Amsterdam 
and the inland towns and cities and the other water- 
ways of Holland there is a perfect network of com- 
munication. The Maas mouth, an hour and a half 
off, lies opposite England, gaping for her trade. The 
New Waterway, made twenty years ago, has been 
deepened since then, so that the largest vessel afloat 



ROTTERDAM 



367 



can enter it, and sail up with the tide to the quays 
of Rotterdam. From the report of the Rotterdam 
Chamber of Commerce, it appears that in 1897, 6,212 
ships, with a gross of 8,434,035 tons, entered the 




A Rotterdam Type. 
By J, Hoynck van Papendrecht. 



port, besides 2,480 fishing boats and fifty-seven for- 
eign tug-boats. Across the Maas, at the Noorder- 
eiland and at Feijenoord, are the harbours ; the largest 
of them, the Rhine Harbour, from the excavations of 
which the Noordereiland has been greatly added to, 
is to be outstripped by one of still greater dimensions 



368 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

that is to be constructed at a cost of over five mil- 
lions of guilders. 

Old Rotterdam lies safely sheltered behind the 
dike, but the new quarters are often under water. 
Sometimes, even, the Maas floods rise so high that 
the whole city and the country beyond are in danger 
of being inundated. One Saturday in the spring of 
1890 there was a spring-tide, and a strong wind was 
blowing off the sea. The water in the river rose 
higher and higher. In the early morning from the 
Beurs Plein, which was so dry still that the cars were 
running (being situate higher than the rest of the 
town lying between the Hoogstraat and the Maas), I 
watched the water pouring out of the neighbouring 
streets into the Remonstrant church. By mid-day the 
cars had all stopped, and business men were making 
their way home in boats, or on lorries, or as best 
they could. Between the Hoogstraat and the river 
all the streets were under water; here and there a 
bridge over a canal appeared above the surface. I 
took a boat and paid some calls, for the fun of the 
thing; the voyage was dangerous because of many 
sunken rocks in the shape of corner-stones and iron 
railings, and the like, and my friends interviewed me 
from upper windows. There were many comical 
scenes and merry ongoings, but indeed the situation 
was critical. The damage done already, especially 
in the cellars and ground floors, was enormous ; and 
a greater evil menaced. The water was within a few 
inches of the top of the dike; if that was surmounted, 



THE GREAT FISHERY 369 

the inner town and the whole country to the north 
would be at its mercy. All Rotterdam gave a sigh 
of relief when about three o'clock in the afternoon 
the flood fell. 

Being on the Maas, we can now visit one of the 
Maas fishing towns, where we have promised our- 
selves an insight into the fisheries, the third of the 
three great industries of Holland. Before setting 
out on this expedition, we must have some informa- 
tion about the nature and extent of the industry in its 
prosperous days when it enabled the Dutch to main- 
tain their war against Spain, and we will seek it at 
a quaint and interesting contemporary source. In 
1614, Tobias Gentleman, Fisherman and Mariner of 
Yarmouth, published his tract "England's Way to 
win Wealth," in which the example held up was ''the 
inestimable wealth that is yearly taken out of His 
Majesty's seas by the Hollanders by their great num- 
ber of busses, pinks, and line-boats." It was a way 
that England was soon to take, as the state of the 
Dutch herring fishery one hundred and fifty years 
later testified ; but at the time he wrote, Gentleman 
had a lamentable picture to draw of the supineness of 
his own country. " O slothful England, and careless 
countrymen ! " he cries ; '' look but on the fellows that 
we call the plump Hollanders ! Behold their dili- 
gence in fishing! and our own careless negligence!" 
Then he goes on to describe the herring and cod fish- 
ery of Holland, which was to the Dutch "the chiefest 
trade and principal gold mine," though their own, 

24 



370 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

country provided none of the materials necessary for 
it, and they had to buy them from other nations, in- 
cluding barley and the best double drink from Eng- 
land; and he commends the matter of his book as 
being — the claim is interesting — " in true value of 
as great substance as the offer of Sebastian Cabota to 
King Henry the Seventh for the discovery of the 
West Indies." 

According to Gentleman, there set out from the 
Maas, the Texel, and the Vlie, each year, a thousand 
sail together to catch herring in the North Sea. Of 
these fully half were the famous busses, from fifty to 
one hundred and fifty tons burden, carrying from six- 
teen to twenty-four men. A beginning was made in 
getting ready the busses in the middle of May, and 
by the first of June the fleet was ready to sail. They 
steered northwest-and-by-north, — ^"then being," says 
Gentleman, in a phrase that makes his book a delight, 
"the very heart of summer and the very yoke of all 
the year," accompanied by a convoy of thirty or forty 
ships of war to guard them from being pillaged and 
taken by their enemies and Dunkirkers, but now that 
the wars are ended (the author is writing during the 
Peace of Twelve Years), by five or six only, as a 
protection against rovers and pirates. Thus they 
came to the Shetlands, and if they reached them be- 
fore June 14, which their law fixed as the opening 
day, they put into Bressa Sound, and there frolicked 
■ on land, until they had sucked out all the marrow of 
the malt and good Scotch ale, which was the best 



THE BUSSES AND PINKS 



371 



liquor that the island doth afford. Once the opening 
day arrives, however, they are off to sea, being keen 
fishermen. "I have taken pleasure in being amongst 




'■^s/ffSiiifiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiii'i ii::;;;; 

Marken Father and Son 
By N. van der Waay. 



them," says the Yarmouth man, in a burst of magna- 
nimity, "to behold the neatness of their ships and 
fishermen, how every man knoweth his own place, 
and all labouring merril}^ together;" and between 



372 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

then and St. Andrew's Day (October 24), they were 
three times laden with herring, which brought their 
country a revenue of between four and five million 
pounds in present value. They sent the herring away 
by merchant ships that came out to them on the fish- 
ing grounds with victual, barrels, salt, and nets, and 
the '' herring-hunters, " as these merchant ships were 
called, carried the fish to the Baltic markets, even as 
far as Russia, and brought back in exchange hemp 
and flax, corn, iron, spruce-deals and barrel-boards, 
all the produce of the eastern countries, besides 
plenty of silver and gold. The busses, meanwhile, 
had followed the shoals to Yarmouth, which they 
reached at Bartholomewtide (August 24), and the her- 
ring caught between then and the end of the season, 
October 24, were divided into two classes. The 
roope-sick herrings, which they were not allowed to 
carry home to Holland or to barrel, they sold for 
ready money at Yarmouth, but the best they sent to 
serve as Lenten store to Bordeaux, Rochelle, Rouen, 
Paris, Amiens, and all Picardy and Calais, receiving 
from thence wines, salt, feathers, Normandy canvas 
and Dowlais cloth, and money and French crowns. 
Moreover, besides the busses, there were vessels of a 
smaller class, from twenty to fifty tons, with from 
eight to twelve men, which were known variously 
as Sword-Pinks, Flat-Bottoms, Holland-Toads. They 
also went to Shetland, but when laden they carried 
their own fish to market, instead of sending them by 
the ''hunters;" the men on the pinks, it seems, were 



WILLEM BEUKELSZOON 373 

hardy fishermen, who went out summer and winter, 
and were very scornful of the men on the busses, whom 
they called "Cow milkers," because, when the busses 
were laid up at the end of summer, they returned to 
dairy work in the meadows. Between busses and 
pinks, says Gentleman, there have been seen at sea, 
in sight at one time, two thousand sails, besides 
others out of sight. Our author's figures grow rounder 
as he warms to his subject, as is apt to be the way 
with all of us, but he draws a very convincing picture 
of Holland's way of winning wealth. Curiously, he 
makes no mention of the true explanation of the great 
success of the Dutch in their herring fisheries — the 
discovery in 1380 by Willem Beukelszoon, a native 
of the Zeeland village Biervliet, of the art of preserv- 
ing the herring with salt. The importance of this 
event to Holland can scarce be over-estimated, and I 
may anticipate what we are to hear later at Vlaardin- 
gen by saying that for all the changes and develop- 
ments of the Dutch herring-fishery industry, the 
method of preserving the fish is precisely the same 
to-day as it was when Beukelszoon introduced it in 
the fourteenth century. 

Besides the summer herring-fishery, there was car- 
ried on a fishing for cod and ling by pinks, and well- 
boats, that is, boats with wells in which the fish were 
kept alive, of from thirty to forty tons, with some 
twelve men each, that sailed from Flushing, Zierik- 
zee,andthe Maas and North-Holland fishing towns. 
There were six hundred of these, Gentleman says, 



374 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

engaged both in summer and in winter, and bringing 
to market not only salted fish, but also fish kept alive 
in the wells. 

We are happy in the selection of Vlaardingen as 
the town in which to seek information about the re- 
cent developments of the herring and cod fisheries, 
for there we are fortunate in making the acquain- 
tance of Mr. A. Hoogendijk, who probably is the 
greatest authority on the subject to be found in Hol- 
land. Mr. Hoogendijk belongs to a family that for 
several generations has been connected with Vlaar- 
dingen fisheries, an^d he himself has closely at heart 
the welfare of the industry of which he is the histo- 
rian. That we were interested in his favourite sub- 
ject gave us, he appeared to consider, a claim upon 
his time, and he kindly spent an afternoon in enlight- 
ening us about the past and the present conditions of 
the Dutch fisheries. 

About the local fisheries of the Zuider Zee and the 
islands, the products of which can be seen in the fish 
markets of The Helder and Amsterdam and elsewhere, 
Mr. Hoogendijk had a good deal to tell us, for which 
there is no space here. I have already indicated that 
the fishery of first importance is the "Great Fishery," 
so called, on the North Sea. This ''great fishery" is 
divided into several branches. There is, first of all, 
the summer herring-fishery of which Gentleman wrote, 
engaged in now almost entirely from Vlaardingen and 
Maassluis and the coast villages of Scheveningen, 
Katwijk and Noordwijk. There is also a summer 




Maassluis. 
By C. Storm van 's Gravesande. 



376 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

industry in salted cod which employs the fishermen 
of Den Helder, and of the South-Holland island vil- 
lages, Middelharnis, Pernis, and Zwartewaal. In 
winter again, a few loggers bring home salted cod, 
and there is a so-called trawl-fishery to fill up the 
time; but the important winter fishery is that for 
fresh cod by well-boats. Mr. Hoogendijk makes it 
clear to us at once that his pet theory, if we may call 
it so, is that the fishing-boat of the future must com- 
bine the appliances for the fresh-cod fishing in win- 
ter and the herring-fishing in summer; and this gives 
a special interest to his account of the various models 
of Dutch fishing-boats with which he answered some 
question of ours about the ancient busses. 

The buss is the oldest known model of all, and it 
existed down to about the middle of this century. 
Now there is not an example of it to be found, but its 
name is retained in the Buizengat in Vlaardingen, 
where these vessels lay up for the winter, and also in 
the folk-lore and songs connected with the great her- 
ring industry. There are two models of busses in the 
church of Maassluis. Following the buss came the 
hoeker and the hoekerbuis, and the name hoeker may 
have been given them because they were used for 
cod fishing with lines. In both of them there were 
wells; it seems certain that in days gone by an 
attempt was made to combine herring and cod fishing 
in one vessel. Even the hoeker, however, ' has com- 
pletely disappeared, unless it is in existence some- 
where as a landing-stage. The curious can see a 



THE SCHEVENINGEN BOM 377 

silver model of one in the Rijks Museum. Early in 
the present century, there was introduced from France 
the chalotipe, a vessel quicker and more beak-shaped 
than the hoeker, that underwent several modifica- 
tions, all tending to increase of speed; and in 1866 
appeared the first logger, of which, with cutter rig, 
the present fleet is chiefly composed. 

Here we will interrupt Mr. Hoogendijk to ask, 
Where, then, does he place the large, square, flat- 
bottomed boms that we are so familiar with on the 
beach of Scheveningen } The boms, he explains, are 
a type all by themselves, and tell a story of charac- 
teristic Dutch determination and audacity. The fish- 
ermen on the coast, being without harbours, — and, 
indeed, harbours for them were an impossibility, — 
conceived the bold idea of building vessels that 
could be beached at their own door. They have been 
well rewarded for their temerity, for with these boms, 
or pinks, they have had the lion's share of the fishery 
in the past. But their day is over, for many reasons. 
In winter, they can only fish off the coast. More- 
over, they have built larger boms, which it has been 
found too dangerous to strand in the old fashion ; 
so they have to run into Vlaardingen and Maassluis, 
and hold an unequal contest with the keel-ships. 
The fishermen of Scheveningen, Katwijk and Noord- 
wijk, however, have the highest repute still for the art 
of preserving the herring by the Beukelszoon method, 
and also of lightly salting them for the herring-smok- 
ing factories of Scheveningen. 



378 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

The logger, however, although it is the type of the 
present fleet, is by no means the latest development 
of the Dutch fishing-boat. Mr. Hoogendijk's ideal 
vessel, it has been explained, is to combine winter 
fresh-cod and the summer herring-fisheries. The 
difficulty is to build a strong and quick boat, with 
dimensions suitable for the rough weather encoun- 
tered in the winter fishing, that at the same time will 
not put too great a strain upon the herring-nets. 
Further, to be successful in fresh-cod fishing, the 
boat must have a well-constructed well, or bu7t, in 
which the fish can be brought to market alive. Orig- 
inally, no doubt, the well was merely a wooden tub 
in the bottom of the vessel ; but to-day, when success 
or failure depends on small details, it has to be a basin 
of elaborate design. Now, the logger is not suitable 
for fresh-cod fishing. So it has been found. It is 
successful with salted cod, but salted cod fetches a 
price in the market many times less than that got for 
fresh cod. On the other hand, the well-boats of 
Middelharnis are fit for cod only, not for herring. 
Accordingly, there has been introduced within the 
last year or two a new model of sloop, built of steel, 
which, Mr. Hoogendijk declares, has proved to be 
capable of carrying on to the best advantage herring- 
fishing, fresh-cod fishing, and salted-cod fishing. A 
still more recent development has been the putting 
on of a steamer for the industry, which so far has 
been completely successful ; and Mr. Hoogendijk hav- 
ing brought us to this point makes a prophecy which 



THE GREAT FISHERY 379 

is our excuse for having dwelled so long on these 
changes. In fifteen years, he says, all the sailing 
vessels will have disappeared from the Dutch fishing 
fleet. 

With the fulfilment of this prediction, Vlaarding- 
en and the "great fishery" will lose much of their 
picturesqueness. In recent years, owing to the 
changes we have been following, many old customs 
have disappeared, notably those connected with the 
First Herring. In the month of June, at the begin- 
ning of the season, three "herring hunters," with a 
"hunting flag" at the mast-head, crossed among the 
fleet on the fishing grounds, and collected the small 
quantity of herring that had been caught, and the 
first of them to have a certain number of barrels on 
board sailed for Vlaardingen in hot haste. On the 
church tower of Vlaardingen in those days there was 
always a watchman, with his glass to his eye, scan- 
ning the North Sea for this first-fruits of Holland's 
wealth. The town was in a state of excitement, and 
as soon as a blue flag was shown on the tower, signal 
that the "first hunter" was in sight, the boys went 
shouting through the streets, "A sign up! A sign 
up ! " and everybody in Vlaardingen took to singing 
the song of De Nieiiwe Having. When the "first 
hunter" arrived in port, there was a gathering, and 
of course a feast, in one of the warehouses, while 
wagons, loaded with the catch, raced one another to 
supply the fishmongers of Amsterdam and The Hague. 
For a time after the introduction of steamers as 



38o AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

"hunters/' though their arrival could be predicted 
almost to an hour, the excitement of the wagon race 
was fostered, but now "herring-hunting" is done 
away with. One relic of the institution remains. A 
firm of Vlaardingen owners are also wine importers, 
and they still send some of the earliest catch to the 
bodegas throughout the country of which they are 
proprietors. 

It was interesting to hear that the initiative of all 
these changes comes from Vlaardingen itself, which 
has been the centre of the ''great fishery" for centu- 
ries. Mr. Hoogendijk was careful to explain that 
they have not been approved by all who are interested 
in the industry, and each in turn was laughed at as 
it was introduced ; but so far, it appears, the results 
have silenced the scoffers. And at any rate the in- 
dustry, if it is to be saved, must be lifted out of the 
old rut. The sacrifice of its picturesqueness will be 
a cheap price to pay for its improvement, for the old 
picturesqueness does not bring the fishermen much 
profit. They are no longer the fellows whom we 
would call the plump Hollanders. Their condition 
would be greatly raised by the regular employment 
that would follow if the summer and the winter fish- 
ing were united in the same boats in the same ports. 
Some of the owners, indeed, have introduced a system 
of regular wages throughout the year. As in many 
other places in Holland, so here in Vlaardingen, and 
not in the fishing industry only, a practical philan- 
thropy is associated with business enterprise. 



THE HOLLAND PROVINCES 381 

In this way we might spend many weeks in these 
Holland provinces, following the fortunes of their 
cities and industries, and reading Dutch history 
everywhere. We might visit Texel, for example, the 
island of sheep and sea-birds, girt with a thousand 
wrecks; and climbing the eastern dunes survey the 
great battle-grounds of the Dutch and English fleets. 
On the m_ainland opposite, behind the great dike of 
Den Helder, we should find the arsenals of the Navy 
to-day. From there we could sail down the Zuider 
Zee, a sunny, shallow sea over which sudden squalls 
seem to be ever breaking, blotting out the coast and 
the dead cities upon it; or we could come south 
through the meadowlands, and visit Alkmaar, where, 
we can almost fancy, the echoes of the fighting times 
are still heard in the streets, and Zaandam, most 
Dutch of Dutch towns, with many a later-day Simon 
Danz in its green-painted cottages sitting talking of 
commercial ventures lost and won. We should go to 
Haarlem in early spring, when the fields are gay with 
the colours of tulip and hyacinth; these bulb-fields 
have their romance no less than the city. Or we 
might time our visit for the Sunday in May when the 
University "Fours" row their annual race on the 
Spaarne. In the dunes round Haarlem we could see 
something of the planting whereby one day these 
rabbit warrens will become pine woods; and so we 
should come down the coast by Noordwijk, where the 
North Sea seems to roll in with a special splendour 
of grey and white, and Katwijk, and Leiden, to The 



382 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

Hague, which is only a village still, with the inter- 
ests of a village, the Amsterdam man will tell you, 
in spite of Court and Parliament, the Plein full of 
uniforms, its fashion and clubs, and the Kurhaus at 
Scheveningen. The Hague, in fact, is not Amster- 
dam. By following some such route as this, and con- 
tinuing it to Dordrecht, we could tap most of the 
Dutch sources that lie in the Holland Provinces; but 
we have only time to visit the picture galleries upon 
it, and to indicate broadly their scope. 

Before going to the National Gallery in Amster- 
dam, let us see the private collection at the house of 
Mr. Six, in the Heeren Gracht. The visitor is ad- 
mitted to four or five rooms containing about a hun- 
dred examples of the Dutch masters. All of them 
are of first rank: "The Letter" by Terburg, "The 
Jealous Wife," by Nicolaas Maes, Metzu's "Herring 
Merchant," "The Milkwoman, " by van der Meer of 
Delft (one of the four or five works by him known to 
exist in Holland), "The Music Lesson" by Frans 
van Mieris, and perhaps we might say even "The 
Wedding-feast," by Jan Steen, are among the more 
important pictures that came from their artists' easels. 
Here, better perhaps than anywhere else, the work of 
Frans van Mieris's son, Willem van Mieris, can be 
studied. The founder of this collection was Jean 
Six, who lived during nearly the whole of the seven- 
teenth century, Holland's golden age. Rembrandt 
was his friend, and painted his mother's portrait for 
him in 1641, and later, probably twenty years later, 




r > 






0;V 



RlJSWIJK. 

From a drawing by F. J. Du Chattel. 



384 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

his own. Both portraits are hanging here. That of 
Jean Six, generally known as "The Burgomaster 
Six," if we are right about its date, belongs to the 
late period in Rembrandt's art, in which "The Staal- 
meesters " was painted. By its suavity it reminds 
one of the early work, "The Lesson in Anatomy," 
though it is freer and looser in execution. In dex- 
terity and in its wise, sober, tolerant insight into 
character, it is one of Rembrandt's greatest pictures; 
and for charm it is surely unrivalled. 

"The Night-Watch," erroneously so called, is in 
the National Gallery, the Rijks Museum, in Amster- 
dam, where it is made the focus of interest. When 
we enter the main hall, the eye is led by the perspec- 
tive of the walls straight to the picture where it hangs 
in the Rembrandt room at the farther end. A year 
or two ago, the visitor looked at it from under a can- 
opy, by which means its effect was heightened for 
him. The canopy is now removed, but the roof of 
the room is so constructed that a strong light is 
thrown directly upon the canvas. The picture, as a 
result, adds to its movement a wonderful brilliance, 
but it may be doubted if it exhibits such a natural 
glow of colour as when seen under less artificial con- 
ditions. This glow of colour is the more remarkable 
when the history of the painting is considered. It 
represents the company of Captain Frans Banning 
Cocq issuing ■ — by day, not by night as was sup- 
posed — from the guard-house, and was painted for 
the Kloveniers Doelen, where it remained until early 



THE NATIONAL GALLERY 385 

in the eighteenth century. The hall in which it was 
hung appears to have become in time a kind of large 
drinking-bar, and the picture suffered from peat — and 
tobacco-smoke. It was too large for the room in the 
Town-Hall, to which it was taken next, and to adapt 
it to the wall strips were cut off it at each side. Yet 
in spite of this ill-treatment, and many restorations, 
the colour shines out with an extraordinary intensity. 
In this respect and in its vigour and movement, *' The 
Night Watch" shows Rembrandt's painting force at 
its zenith, though for many ''The Lesson in Anat- 
omy" in The Hague, painted ten years earlier, when 
the artist was only twenty-five years of age, will 
always be his masterpiece. Quite worthy of being 
classed with these two pictures and with the Six por- 
trait are "The Staalmeesters," already mentioned, 
and the portrait of Elizabeth Bas, both in the Rij'Ks 
Museum. 

The National Gallery in Amsterdam is very com- 
plete; the whole course of Dutch painting can be 
followed in it, to the work of modern artists like 
Josef Israels, Anton Mauve, Jacob Maris, who real- 
ise for us, as the great masters did not always, the 
quality, solely atmospheric, indefinable, of Dutch 
landscape. (There are, indeed, still later develop- 
ments of Dutch painting, not to be overlooked, repre- 
sented variously by G. H. Breitner, M. Bauer, Th. 
van Hoytema, M. W. van der Valk, to mention a 
few names only, that must be studied elsewhere. 
There has been a quickening in the art of Holland of 

25 



386 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

recent years. In literature, painting, music, archi- 
tecture, there is a younger race of artists devoted to 
its artistic ideals, which is producing, in the face of 
misunderstanding and a want of appreciation, work 
that is full of the excesses of revolt, and of the in- 
fluence of exotic tendencies, but that discovers as 
well a national inspiration.) Two pictures of Dirk 
Jacobsz show the beginnings of those corporation 
pieces of which "The Night Watch," "The Staal- 
meesters," and the paintings of Frans Hals at Haar- 
lem are the highest achievements. There is at least 
one good example of the precocious Lucas van Lei- 
den; and there are many of the great portrait painteirs 
of pre-Rembrandt days, Nicolaas Elias, whose "Por- 
trait of Marten Ray" (if it be his) is a work of singu- 
lar distinction, de Keyser, Paul Moreelse, Mierevelt. 
The portraits of Mierevelt especially illustrate the 
historical interest, apart from the artistic, possessed 
by the Rijks Museum. They show us William of 
Orange, more than taciturn,, morose even, Frederik 
Henry, Oldenbarneveld, and Jacob Cats, the popular 
moralising poet. A portrait of Maurits is attributed 
to him. There was plenty of strength, but not much 
beauty apparently, in the earlier Stadhouders; but 
in Honhorst's portrait (and in others), the clever and 
ambitious William II. is discovered with fine feat- 
ures, and a forehead of singular refinement; and it is 
a strong, handsome, curious face that looks at you 
from Schalcken's portrait, painted in England, of 
William HI. Here, also, are Gerard Don's "Night 





The Harbour. 
From a painting by Jacob Maris. 



388 AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 

School," "The Spinner" of Nicolaas Maes, the "Par- 
rot," the "Sint Nicolaas," and many other well- 
known works, by Jan Steen, several by Metzu, 
Terburg, Pieter de Hooch; examples of the beauti- 
ful seascape art of Bakhuysen and of Willem van der 
Velde, the Younger; landscapes by Ruysaael, Wou- 
werman, and the unequal Hobbema: there is scarce 
one of the Dutch masters who is not represented here 
at his best. Every time one goes to the Rijks Mu- 
seum he discovers some piece of great painting he 
had overlooked before, or is appealed to in some 
mood or fancy by a picture that failed to impress him 
previously. So, on our latest visit, we could almost 
have persuaded ourselves that Jan Steen is nowhere 
so masterly in breadth and gaiety as in the "Dancing 
Lesson," nor Frans Hals so absolutely great as in his 
portrait of himself and his wife. 

Really, of course, Frans Hals is seen at his great- 
est, not in this picture, nor in the "Jester," also in 
the Rijks Museum, but in the Stadhuis of his native 
city of Haarlem. It is the spirit, the ardour of Hals 
in these others that affects us; and in Haarlem we 
find that quality carried into six great corporation 
pictures, painted between his thirtieth and his sev- 
enty-fifth years, in which can be followed the transi- 
tion from the heavier red tone of his earliest work to 
the light, transparent golden glow of his middle-age, 
and the decline again to a certain heaviness. Two 
unfinished pictures of the same order are invaluable 
to the student of painting by their suggestion of how 
the work of Frans Hals was built up. 



DUTCH PAINTINGS 389 

From Haarlem we visit Leiden, and see the works 
of Cornelis Engelbrechtsz and of his more distin- 
guished pupil, Lucas van Leiden, in the Municipal 
Museum there; and so to The Hague. The great 
pictures of The Hague, with the exception of a few in 
private galleries, of which that of Baron Steengracht, 
in the Vyverberg, is the most important, are lodged 
in the Royal Museum, generally known as the Mau- 
ritshuis. The collection has an interesting and curi- 
ous history. A few of the pictures were comprised 
in an earlier one formed by the Princes of Orange, 
chiefly by Prince Frederik Henry, at whose death it 
was dispersed. To these, many masterpieces were 
added by William the Fifth Stadhouder, whose col- 
lection became celebrated. On the occupation of 
Holland by France, in 1795, it was carried to Paris, 
and thelre a portion of it remains ; but most of the 
pictures were returned in 181 5, and a few^ years later 
were placed in the Mauritshuis. They are the nu- 
cleus of the present collection. The Mauritshuis is 
the most pleasant to visit of the public galleries of 
Holland. It is not large, and it is instructive rather 
than sensational, "The Lesson in Anatomy" de- 
mands attention through no adventitious effects. 
Whether Paul Potter's "Young Bull " has not derived 
from its size and subject a greater repute than it merits 
artistically, is a question upon which opinion differs. 
Certainly it was a wonderful achievement in paint for 
a young boy of twenty-two, and it is one of the most 
characteristic works of Holland, if not of Dutch art. 



390 



AMSTERDAM AND PROVINCES 



Paul Potter died before he had reached the age of 
thirty. His portrait hangs in this gallery, sympa- 
thetically painted by van der Heist, whose accom- 
plishment we are apt to overlook in. the stiff and 
lifeless corporation pictures that are placed, cruelly 




The Cathedral of Dort. 



for his reputation (yet there have been those who 
admired them beyond Rembrandt's), beside "The 
Night Watch " in the Rijks Museum. To the stu- 
dent, the Mauritshuis affords an opportunity of study- 
ing, often in eminent examples, not only the great 
Dutch masters, but others, chiefly early painters, 



DUTCH PAINTINGS 391 

whose work is comparatively little known, — An- 
thonie Mor, for example, in the "Portrait of a Silver- 
smith," de Keyser, in his splendid "Portrait of a 
Scholar," and especially Ravesteyn. Jan Anthonisz 
van Ravesteyn, though, perhaps, not born in The 
Hague, became one of its most distinguished citizens. 
He was at the head of the Painters' Brotherhood there, 
a society which numbered among its members artists 
in all parts of Holland, and still exists, after a check- 
ered history, in the Drawing Academy of The Hague 
to-day. Ravesteyn is scarce known outside of The 
Hague, where, besides his portraits in the Royal Mu- 
seum and in private galleries, there are four great 
corporation pieces by him in the Doelen building of 
the Arquebusiers of Saint Sebastian. There remain 
to be visited the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam, and 
the collection, chiefly of Ary Scheffers, in the Muni- 
cipal Museum in Dordrecht. In the Boymans Mu- 
seum is a picture ascribed to Dirck Bouts ; and a 
"Portrait of a Man," by Carel Fabritius, that itself 
compensates one for another experience of Rotterdam 
dirt and noise. Dordrecht on the other hand would 
not be less delightful though no Ary Scheffers were 
treasured in it. 



/^ 



MIDDELBURG AND THE ISLANDS OF 
ZEELAND. 

FROM Dordrecht to Middelburg we will take, the 
old route by boat, a day's sail through intricate 
waterways, canals and straits, tortuous arms of the 
Maas and the Schelde, among the mysterious islands 
of Zeeland. Mysterious they are, that is to say, 
when seen from the sea, on such a voyage; and mys- 
terious, as all Holland is, when we consider their 
history. Of all the provinces, Zeeland, as might be 
expected, carries on the severest fight with the waters. 
I have lying before me as I write a chart of the is- 
lands in the eighteenth century; you cannot recog- 
nise them on the map to-day. As we sail among 
them, we will notice some of the changes that have 
occurred. The arms of Zeeland are a lion half out of 
the water, with the motto Luctor et eniergo. That is 
the mystery of the province. But the Zeeland peas- 
ant (so the story runs) translated the motto thus, — 
Lttkft van daag niet dan lukf t mergen, "If it 
doesn't succeed to-day, it will to-morrow," and so 
soon as you set foot on the islands this spirit of reso- 
lution is evident. The mystery flies away before the 
grim, stern fact of a country snatched and held from 
the sea, and converted into one of the fairest prov- 



MIDDELBURG 393 

inces in the world. The reader must not feel ag- 
grieved because, now that our story draws near an 
end, it seems to be going to finish as it began. No 
ingenuity can discover a new key to Holland ; the 
fight with the waters is the only one that opens its 
secret. 

We leave the towers of Dordrecht behind us, and 
by way of the Dorsche Kil come out upon the wide 
and airy Hollandsche Diep, from the low, hazy shores 
of which the reflections of the trees dip to meet the 
white sails of innumerable craft. It is a deceptive 
calm. Beyond the great viaduct at Moerdijk lies the 
Biesbosch, perpetual testimony (so far as anything of 
its kind in Holland is perpetual) to the rage of the 
waters here. Skirting the east coasts of Overflakke, 
a network of polders, we reach the Krammer, and 
Schouwen, Duiveland, and St. Philipsland, the first 
of the Zeeland islands, are in front of us. In the 
chart to which I have referred, Schouwen and Duive- 
land, now two islands in one, are nine or ten, and 
Zierikzee is a maritime town. Since then, the gaps 
have been filled up, and the land from near Ouwer- 
kerk to Brunnisse reclaimed; but there have been 
losses also, and vv^here the Neeltje banks now shim- 
mer on the surface of the Roompot there used to be 
dry land. The highest dikes and the lowest polders 
in Holland are to be found in Schouwen. As for St. 
Philipsland, home of the mussel-fishers, it scarce ex- 
isted. It is marked on the chart slikken, and the 
reader, from what he saw of Groningen slikkeii forma- 



394 



THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND 



tions, will understand its origin. By a narrow arm 
of the sea between these islands we reach the Keeten, 
which the Spaniards waded to the capture of Zierik- 




A Lady of Tholen. 



zee, an exploit never to be forgotten by the reader of 
Motley. On the east side of the Keeten is Tholen, 
called after the town of that name where the Dukes 
of Brabant levied toll upon those crossing to the 



MIDDELBURG 395 

mainland. Tholen has the same history of reclama- 
tion. The changes in form of North and South Beve- 
land are still more remarkable. The traveller by rail 
from Flushing knows that after leaving Krabbendijk 
he crosses from Zeeland to the mainland over the 
Kreekerak, and if he looks out of the carriage win- 
dow, northward, he sees an oozy, sluggish arm of 
the Schelde washing a slimy coast that stretches 
to Yerseke. Possibly this half-submerged bank is 
marked on his map verdronkeii-land^ '' drowned land. " 
In this chart of the thirteenth century, there are 
marked upon it nine villages, and one town, Reimers- 
waal, of whose civic pretensions we have spoken ear- 
lier. More recently, there have been inundations. 
North-Beveland, for example, was swallowed up in 
1532, and remained under water sixty-six years. Old 
Arnemuiden, a Hanse town, had disappeared some 
years before. In this century, both Walcheren and 
Tholen have suffered. But the gains have been 
greater than the losses. Goes, the capital of South- 
Beveland, was a maritime town. Opposite it lay an 
island, indicated now on the map as Wolphaarts Dijk. 
The land between the two was reclaimed in the be- 
ginning of this century, and on this Lodewijk's Pol- 
der, better known as Wilhelmina's Polder, there 
cluster under the elms the hamlets and villages and 
farms that fill the great corn and cherry market of 
Goes. Past Wolphaarts Dijk, we reach the mouth 
of the canal to Middelburg, and entering it, lose sight 
of the towers of Verre, — Kampverre, the ferry for 




Woman of the Isle of Walcheren. 



MIDDELBURG 397 

Kampen in North-Beveland, with streets and houses 
which, though old and decayed, still tell a story of 
former greatness. And so, through the flourishing 
land of Walcheren, Zeeland's garden, we arrive at the 
ancient capital of Middelburg. 

From Middelburg we might go south and discover 
a lesson with the same moral. In Nieuwe St. Joost- 
land, for example, we should see from the similarity 
in manners and appearance of the " Newlanders, " as 
its inhabitants are called, to the people of South- 
Beveland, that their country has only recently been 
joined to Walcheren. Across the Schelde, again, in 
Dutch Flanders, an arm of the sea lay between Hulst 
and Axel; Biervliet,*the birthplace of the father of 
the Dutch fisheries, was almost an island by itself; 
Cadzand was surrounded by water and shoals : can the 
reader imagine how much more naked than now, even, 
was that land of Flanders which meets the eye of the 
traveller who sails to Flushing or to Antwerp.'* I 
dare say, however, that the reader will be better ad- 
vised in remaining at Middelburg, especially if it is 
market day there. When he has seen the Stadhuis, 
and the Museum (with the portrait of de Ruyter by 
Ferdinand Bol), and has explored the Abbey and the 
old streets and houses, if he returns to the market- 
place, he will find that while he has not gone to the 
islands, the islands have come to him. He will find 
there all the variety of costume that Zeeland pos- 
sesses. The inhabitants of towns like Middelburg 
and Flushing dress in modern fashion. All over 




Going to Market in Walcheren. 



THE WALCHEREN HAT 399 

Holland, costume is confined to the villages, the 
peasants, the dwellers on the soil. If in a town on 
ordinary days, we meet a Walcheren hat or a Goes 
shawl, we may be sure that the wearer is a country 
girl who has taken service there, and is allowed, 
probably encouraged, by her mistress to retain the 
dress she wore at home. But on market day, Mid- 
delburg is full of peasants from Axel to Brouv/ers- 
haven, and it is not difficult to tell by their costume 
from which island, and even from which corner of an 
island, they have come. 

Take that peasant woman there, for example. Her 
hat proclaims that she is a native of Walcheren. It 
is of very fine straw, trimmed with wide white ribbon, 
and white streamers of the same material (I must 
crave pardon for my lack of skill in the terminology 
of millinery), fastened to the lining, are brought 
round in front. I see another Walcheren woman 
close by, and she has blue streamers, attached to the 
hat by a little hook of gold, hanging down her back. 
Before the hat is put on, I am instructed, elaborate 
preparations are necessary. First, the hair is gath- 
ered, and rolled upon the forehead, and is bound 
tightly in its place there by a small hood or cap of 
white linen. In this is fastened by pins a band of 
gold, the use of which will be explained later. Next 
comes the nnits, somewhat like a Scots mutch, of 
very stiffly starched white linen. To enable this 
muts to fit tightly in spite of its stiff starching, there 
is a pleated inset; you can see the village girls any 



400 THE ISLANDS OF ZEELAND 

day sitting indoors working this inset, pleating it 
tightly with their finger-nails on a board. Over this 
miits comes the hat. 




Brabant Costume. 

The head-ornaments of this woman are numerous, 
and you may be certain that they are of real gold. 
The Dutch peasant does not wear sham jewelry. To 
the band of gold already mentioned (which, by the 
way, is not so broad as that worn by the Frisian 



THE WALCHEREN BODICE 401 

woman), there are attached firmly at the temples, but 
hanging free, corkscrew-looking ornaments of gold. 
These have pendants of gold embossed, each with a 
tiny pearl drop. The curious ornament that covers 
half of the forehead is a plate of flat gold, beautifully 
worked, curved to the shape of the head, and tapered 
to a point which is stuck back among the hair at the 
side. The necklace is of red coral, and has a golden 
clasp. 

The Walcheren jacket or bodice, generally of black 
material, has short sleeves, with bands of broad vel- 
vet that grip the arm tightly. Its peculiarity is that 
it is made out of one piece, which is pleated into 
shape, — a very handsome shape often. It is cut low, 
and pointed in front, and nowadays a kerchief is 
always worn with it. Save where it peeps out behind 
and at the foot, the skirt, generally of blue and white 
stripe, is entirely covered by an apron of dark-coloured 
stuff, fastened at the back by a gold hook. The shoes 
are of leather, with a black and white leather bow set 
low upon the instep, and in the centre of the bow 
there is a silver buckle, worked somewhat in the 
manner of the well-known Zeeland buttons. 

Now, if we look round the market-place, we can 
distinguish Walcheren women at once, though prob- 
ably each of the seventeen villages in the island 
affects some slight distinction in its costume. Yon- 
der is a native of West-Kapelle, for example, as can 
be seen by a peculiarity in the dressing of the hair. 
This woman, again, who wears above the viuts a cap 

26 



402 



THE ISLANDS OF ZEELAND 



of transparent material and singular shape, comes 
from the immediate neighbourhood of Middelburg 
itself. All the peasants we have noticed are dressed 




Dutch Costume. 



in market and Sunday costume. So is this woman 
with her baskets of butter and eggs. But the fisher- 
woman of Arnemuiden, yonder, is in workaday garb^ 
except that she has exchanged her wooden shoes for 



THE GOES SHAWL 403 

leather ones. You seldom find Dutch peasants com- 
ing into town in sabots. 

In the market-place to-day there are many girls 
from Goes. The costume of South-Beveland closely 
resembles that of Walcheren, though it is neither so 
formal nor so becoming. There is the same, or 
nearly the same, bodice, and the same apron. The 
chief differences are that a hat is not worn, and that 
a shawl of colours never seen in Walcheren is pleated 
low upon the neck. This shawl is the distinguishing 
mark of South-Beveland ; and from certain differences 
in the manner of wearing it, as well as in the head- 
ornaments and the shape of the cap, one can tell the 
Protestants from the Catholics. There are no Catho- 
lic peasants in Walcheren. As we go farther north, 
we find the costumes losing in completeness. In 
North-Beveland and Tholen, there is left only the 
head-dress; no muts is worn under the cap, and the 
ornaments have a general resemblance to those of 
Walcheren. In Schouwen and Duiveland, farther 
north still, a curious transition stage has been reached. 
There, also, it is in the head-dress only that costume 
has been retained, — in Schouwen, indeed, in the cap 
only, for the gold ornaments have been discarded. 
But the peasants of Schouwen and Duiveland wear 
over their cap a modern bonnet, generally of exceed- 
ing gaudiness, with broad ribbons that tie in a bow 
under the chin. Such hideous combinations in dress 
— clearly a transition — ■ are to be seen among the 
peasants in most parts of Holland. 



404 THE ISLANDS OF ZEELAND 

There is probably to be discovered in Middelburg 
market some costumes of Dutch Flanders also. If 
we see a woman dressed with an extreme simplicity, 
approaching to the severity of Scotland, with full 
skirts, sloping shoulders, and a bodice perfectly plain 
save for a little frilling in front, we may conclude 
that she comes from Cadzand. We may be certain of 
it, if the tight-fitting cap, outlining the face, and 
fastened under the chin, is relieved by two gold orna- 
ments, and set off by a piece of lace hanging at the 
back. The head -ornaments survive in Axel, however, 
and the flowing cap falls over enormous sleeves that 
cause the back of the wearer to appear very small; 
while in Hulst a shawl is worn over the shoulders, 
upon which the cap rests very much as if it were a 
wig. 

An early morning tram carries us out of the mar- 
ket-place of Middelburg, and by a pleasantly shaded 
alley brings us to Flushing. The Queenborough boat 
at the quay has got up steam ; but before the ferry 
steamer comes to ply us down to her, there is time for 
a snapshot picture of the famous old seaport-town. 
A maze of twisted streets; in the heart of it a little 
market-place where the country women sit huddled 
over their baskets; the figure of de Ruyter standing 
out against the sea. Then we come upon the clang of 
shipbuilding yards, and where the street emerges upon 
the inner haven, the great white side of a new naval 
cruiser blocks the view. A shout warns us out of the 



FLUSHING 



405 



way, and over the bridge behind us a little swarthy 
peasant comes trundling his vegetable barrow; he has 
curly, black hair and rings in his ears, and the girl 
trotting and chattering beside him is dark and comely, 
— Zeelanders of the Spanish type. The sound of 
their voices is lost in the clang of hammers, and 
presently they disappear round the white hull. It is 
a picture of Holland. And later, when we have 
circled out of the harbour, and the weather-cocks on 
the Flushing spires are lost as we glide along the 
silent shore of Flanders, where the naked piles stick 
up like the ribs of a dead land, that picture of Hol- 
land comes to mind again : the cruiser, the token 
of an empire, and the cheery gardeners, types of the 
small traffickers, laborious, penurious, yet not with- 
out romantic blood in their veins, who maintain it. 
Some one at our shoulder, pointing northward up the 
coast of Walcheren, says : '' The dunes ; and beyond, 
West-Kapelle, the great dijke;" and the picture 
seems complete. 




LB S '08 



